Re: Propsal: MHEAD for Fast inline image formatting Was: Multiple connections

On Wed, 12 Oct 1994, Henrik Frystyk wrote:
> A general problem that I see in the proposals until now is that we have
> no guarantee that the images are in fact on the same server as the main
> document. Often this is _not_ the case and then it doesn't help to keep
> the connection open nor is it easy for the server to get the size of
> the image.

Actually, I'd dispute this. I bet we could get one of our web-crawler
authors to add to his crawling algorithm a measure of the ratio of 
inlined-images-on-same-site to inlined-images-off-site, and that it 
would probably be something on the order of 20-1, if not 100-1.  We can't 
guarantee it, and we certainly shouldn't set up a protocol that would 
make inlining off-site images difficult or impossible, but forgoing 
optimizations because of it is a bad choice, I think.  

> I think a general solution must be based on at least two connections.
> First the main document gets retrived. If the client is text-based then
> fine - no more connections are made. If not then the client can sort
> the requests for inline images and make simultaneously (multi-threaded)
> connenctions to the servers involved. These can then be multipart, MGET
> or whatever solution we come up with.

Right, this would be great, and I don't see how it contradicts other 
proposals made here, it's just another parallel action.

	Brian

Received on Wednesday, 12 October 1994 20:17:24 UTC