[9545] in www-talk@info.cern.ch
Re: Proposal for SIZE attribute
???@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Brian Behlendorf)
Tue Jan 9 17:12:59 1996
Date: Tue, 9 Jan 1996 14:00:27 -0800 (PST)
From: Brian Behlendorf <brian@organic.com>
To: Ian Burrell <iburrell@loki.stanford.edu>
Cc: www-html@w3.org
In-Reply-To: <9601090152.AA16718@loki.stanford.edu>
Resent-From: www-html@w3.org
On Mon, 8 Jan 1996, Ian Burrell wrote:
> I was thinking recently that a SIZE attribute that indicated the
> physical size in bytes of an included object would be a useful
> addition to HTML.
...
> Although the HTTP protocol
> gives the size in the header, this requires a network connection.
Which doesn't really penalize you if it's done right. Consider the news
reader "trn" - it was designed to minimize the amount of wait-time by
getting information from the news server in the background while you read
posts or pick threads from a menu. In the same way, the meta-information
(size, content-type variants, etc) about a linked object can be obtained
after the page has been loaded and rendered, but before a subsequent link
is followed.
As for using this to base decisions on inlining objects - the current
netscape model of opening a bunch of parallel connections could handle
the benefits you see this providing already. With the addition of
HTTP/1.1, a client could fetch the page, do a HEAD on each inlined
object, and then fecth them in whatever order it prefers, all over the
same TCP connection. It gets even better with HTTP-NG, when the server
can send to the browser information the browser wasn't even aware it
needed yet, like metainformation about inlined objects.
Brian
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