Re: HTTP: T-T-T-Talking about MIME Generation

According to Brian Behlendorf:
> 
> For rendering-while-downloading browsers, MGET will improve performance 
> overall - the UPP performance will only be improved if the person uses 
> the Netscape-only WIDTH and HEIGHT attributes to the IMG tag so the page 
> can be laid out before the latter image retreivals have even begun.  It's 
> precisely because NetScape can fetch the first few bytes of many inlined 
> images that it can calculate how to lay out the page without having to 
> adjust layout later.  Since -NG will allow the layout-specific info in 
> the first few packets, it will improve both UPP and overall speed.
> 

Brian makes a very good point that I wasn't fully aware of.  It bears
repeating. If documents containing in-line images all specify the
WIDTH and HEIGHT of those images then an MGET can be nearly as good as
multiple connections in user preceived performance.

Of course, there is the political problem of getting providers to include
this information in their documents.  There is no mention of these parameters
in the IMG tag in the HTML 2.0 specification.  I don't know about their
status for 3.0.

> 
> As a content-provider that gets 300,000 hits a day, as soon as there is 
> an implementation of SESSION or MGET for any of the full-feature servers 
> (NCSA or WN) that is mirrored by a few browsers out there I'll install it.
> 
> 

There is a little bit of a chicken and egg problem here.  I would happily
put MGET in WN if there were any browsers supporting it.  I would probably
even put it in if there were some consensus on a standard for doing it,
assuming it was kept simple.

John Franks

Received on Friday, 16 December 1994 12:59:05 UTC