Re: [minutes] 20101110 Web Performance Working Group

On Mon, 15 Nov 2010 13:38:08 +0100, James Simonsen <simonjam@chromium.org>  
wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 12, 2010 at 1:08 AM, Sigbjørn Vik <sigbjorn@opera.com> wrote:

>> I'd like to understand why you think the line in the sand
>> should be drawn exactly between path and subdomain, rather than between
>> subdomain and domain.
>
> Particularly with app hosting services, people are paying to have their
> sites hosted. There's a real expectation that their content is being
> protected by the app hosting service. These services have chosen  
> subdomains
> to separate their customers content. That's a good indication that we  
> should
> follow suit.
>
> More generally, many hosting services now use subdomains instead of  
> separate
> paths. Previously, people would use a service like Geocities or their  
> ISP to
> host a site in their own path. Now, even simple sites like blogs, are  
> hosted
> on sites like wordpress or blogspot, which use subdomains.
>
> We do have to be pragmatic, but isolating timing data from separate
> subdomains is most in line with how content is hosted.

I don't have any intention of dragging this out. I don't seem able to  
convince you otherwise, and I haven't seen any arguments from you to  
convince me, nor any examples of pages where timing information would be  
an issue. Let's just agree that there are strong opinions both ways,  
consensus is unreachable, and settle for a majority decision after the  
arguments have been exhausted.

To reply to the above:
In general, people who pay will buy their own domain. People who use free  
services to share content, typically do so to distribute and publisize the  
content, not to protect it. If they get scripting access to the subdomain,  
then the hosting provider cannot fulfill such requirements/expectations  
for protection in any case (due to cookies, etc), so if such expectations  
exist they are false. I'd also claim that most content on subdomains  
belong to the same site, and thus that sharing, not isolating, timing  
information would be most in line with current content hosting[1].  
Disregarding all of that, I still don't see how timing information becomes  
a problem.

And most importantly, I think it is extremely useful for Web developers to  
be able to get timing data on their entire site, even though it is spread  
out over several subdomains (which is very common, even called best  
practices these days).

[1] Even the top hits for the two domains you mention use subdomains to  
host inline elements of their top pages. wordpress.com loads inlines from  
files.wordpress.com, and googleblog.blogspot.com loads inlines from  
bp.blogspot.com. I think sharing timing information on those domains would  
be beneficial, and I have stil not seen any subdomains which would suffer  
the slightest.

-- 
Sigbjørn Vik
Quality Assurance
Opera Software

Received on Monday, 15 November 2010 13:46:13 UTC