Re: attributes, software architecture, CC/PP and accessibility

On Tue, 1 Feb 2000, Nir Dagan wrote:

> One should note that serving one long document to all clients 
> rather than several short alternatives can 
> save badwidth as any form of content negotiation reduces caching,
> even in a perfect HTTP spec and a perfect implementation.

Indeed.  And announcing that the document depends on the user agent
string seems to pretty much guarantee the worst, because there are
thousands of different user agent strings, and a proxy cache server
could have no idea whether two similar user agent strings were to be
regarded as functionally equivalent or not.

So at the very least, it has to contact the original server to enquire
if the variant(s) it already holds are suitable.

May I recommend the useful tutorial and links to other resources at:
http://www.mnot.net/cache_docs/  ?

There's something to be said for sending a single document that is
fully functional as-is, and doing any detailed presentational
adjustments (for those who consent to enable client-side scripting)
via javascript.

best regards

Received on Wednesday, 2 February 2000 07:09:32 UTC