- From: Phil Archer <parcher@icra.org>
- Date: Tue, 06 May 2008 12:38:09 +0100
- To: Julian Reschke <julian.reschke@gmx.de>
- CC: Brian Smith <brian@briansmith.org>, 'Mark Nottingham' <mnot@mnot.net>, 'atom-syntax Syntax' <atom-syntax@imc.org>, 'HTTP Working Group' <ietf-http-wg@w3.org>
Julian Reschke wrote: [..] > > What I'm missing a bit in this discussion is the fact that the Link > header already is specified, deployed and supported by some UAs (such as > Firefox (*) and Opera AFAIK). I decided to try and test this out. To which end I created a simple page at [1] that does not have an HTML link to a stylesheet but then configured the server to include such a link using HTTP. The results show that IE and Firefox do not implement HTTP Link but that Opera 9 does. However... the link you give to the Firefox Link Pre-fetching FAQ is interesting. It posits a single relationship type of 'prefetch' - simply a hint to the browser that it might be worth fetching whatever it points to because the page that's about to be parsed probably includes a link to it. Hmmm... that's not quite the same is it? It still needs the link within the HTML to actually use whatever it prefetched. IMHO, that _is_ a case for Brian's suggestion of a specific header. It fits the semantics of link in that it does point to a related resource, but the relationship type is stretched a little I think. Suppose that, for whatever reason, you prefer to use your own stylesheet - the prefetch might have exactly the opposite of the desired effect - i.e. using bandwidth to fetch something irrelevant. Meanwhile, by using rel="stylesheet", my HTTP Link header pointing to the stylesheet is ignored by Firefox. From a POWDER point of view it's important that links encoded within HTTP or HTML should be semantically identical and therefore present publishers with alternative ways of producing the same result - simply because not all publishers are the same. > > Thus I'd really prefer to *extend* it in a backwards-compatible way (as > proposed by Mark N.) instead of inventing something new. +1 to that. Phil [1] http://www.fosi.org/archive/httplinktest/ > (*) for instance: > <http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Link_prefetching_FAQ> > >
Received on Tuesday, 6 May 2008 11:38:45 UTC