[Bug 11235] Support a rel attribute that restricts cookie transmission

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=11235

--- Comment #13 from Alexander Romanovich <alex@sirensclef.com> 2010-12-29 17:29:32 UTC ---
I can't comment on how common usage of an attribute like this would be across
the web in general, but I can briefly describe the effect I would anticipate
from such a feature in the content management world, which is what prompted me
to file this request.

I work on a large scale CMS in education. Looking at a typical client, there
are images (most frequently thumbnails accompanying news stories, event
listings, galleries, etc.) that appear often in list format on a large number
of pages throughout any given site. It is not a situation where yimg would be
desirable, as there are several reasons why our custom image
manipulation/deployment tools are used by our clients on their local servers as
opposed to remote hosting, and other reasons why these particular clients may
not wish to use third party remote hosting to store their image media in
general. Using Google Analytics alone, which is a distinct commonality, you're
looking at a large chunk of cookie data being transmitted to the server per
image request. (The same is true for script and link tags which the CMS embeds
in templates.) These are high traffic sites, and the CMS often powers more than
one site running on the same machine (I have one client that has chosen to
drive six sites with the CMS on one server).

In other words: frequent usage of script, link, and especially image tags
throughout a web site, multiplied by at least the large chunk of Google
Analytics cookie data per unique request, multiplied by the volume of users of
a high traffic site, multiplied by the number of sites on that server,
translates to a lot of time spent receiving data from the end user, which as
you know is much slower than sending data to them. Since it would be trivial to
modify our codebase in order to apply a new attribute to content we generate,
it would be an equally trivial process to cut bandwidth usage and server
response time for users of our CMS, across the board. I would imagine adoption
by Wordpress, etc. would result in a similar story, as well as sites which
simply display a large quantity of resources. The benefit here is that it
provides a painless option to reduce bandwidth usage and resource load latency
when the alternatives (which have been noted here) are either impossible or
incompatible, or simply inconvenient.

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Received on Wednesday, 29 December 2010 17:29:37 UTC