Re: client side includes

[Frank Tobin]
> > I think you overstate your case.  Hitting the server for another
> > chunk of data is not that expensive.  It happens all the time for
> > images, CSS files, etc.

At 2001-02-03T11:32-0000, Ralph Corderoy wrote:-

> Pity the poor users.  The latency is awful from a user's perspective.
> Yes, it already happens with images, but look what was required;  the
> width and height attributes so a UA could display the HTML whilst it
> waited for the image.  There's a big hit on many sites where another
> retrieval is required for an external CSS file and there isn't the
> `width/height' kludge around that.

Yes, but linked style sheets and images only need to be downloaded once
each. They can be cached locally, thereby decreasing download times for
subsequent pages using them. Exactly the same is true of external
entities. Embedded style sheets, SSIs, etc. must be downloaded for each
and every page, even when they are identical. As a dialup user, I usually
find bandwidth much more of a problem than latency for web browsing.

With HTTP 1.1 persistent connections and pipelining, many of the costs of
separate requests over SSIs can be removed, so increased server load and
latency are no longer nearly so significant.


Tim Bagot

Received on Saturday, 3 February 2001 08:55:21 UTC