RE: client side includes

> From:	Murray Macdonald [SMTP:murray@mha.ca]
> 
> The web would be many times faster if a server could attach image files to
> the end of the html file and return one file.  No caching advantage you
> say?  There is no reason a smarter UA could tell the server which images
> it has already in the request header.  
> 
	[DJW:]  A web compatible format that does this has existed
	since before HTML or the web ever existed.  The web connects
	resources, it is not solely HTML.  That format now supports
	web links.  It is PDF.

	[DJW:]  I believe Microsoft "HTML Help" format is also such
	a compound document in a single file, but based on HTML, not 
	PostScript.

> It really is too bad we don't have a smarter http request header...  How
> many of you would like to know if a browser accepts JavaScript?  How many
> of you would like to know a browser's 
	[DJW:]  
	The real problem is that HTML is being used for a job for
	which which it was not designed, with the result that one 
	gets compound documents consisting of dozens of parts, rather
	than a single resource at the end of a URL.

	(As far as I know, PDF can only re-use resources within a 
	single document, but a PDF document can sometimes represent
	the whole of a commercial web site. HTTP 1.1 allows the
	incremental loading of PDF, so the client has the option of
	fetching it piecemeal, like typically happens with HTML based
	compound documents, in order to reduce latency.

	Acrobat can make an initial request to find out structure
	inforamtion, then decide what sections of the file to 
	fetch.)

	Incidentally, this thread seems more about HTTP than HTML.
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>

Received on Tuesday, 6 February 2001 12:28:28 UTC