Re: Caching of Style sheets

Hakon Lie wrote:
> 
> Clark Breyman writes:
> 
>  > On review of the CSS1 W3C Working Draft 05-May-96, one question jumped
>  > immediately to mind: what about caching of style sheets? A UUID
>  > mechanism could allow user agents to cache commonly used style sheets.
>  > This would eliminating redundant transfers of identical sheets, save
>  > time on parsing of the style sheet and save space in the cache.
>  >
>  > While I have no particular preference for the extension, perhaps uuids
>  > could by added by adding an @uuid at_rule followed by a DCE/COM style
>  > UUID. @import would need to be modified to be:
>  > IMPORT_SYM URL [UUID] ';'
> 
> UAs should try to cache style sheets as they cache HTML documents
> today. Caching could be based on the URL of the style sheet, what are
> the argument for introducing UUIDs?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> -h&kon
> 
> Hakon W Lie, W3C/INRIA, Sophia-Antipolis, France
> http://www.w3.org/people/howcome  howcome@w3.org

While my suggestion might be restated "Why don't we put a UUID in every 
web content object?", I thought it best to limit my suggestion to CSS 
as there is still the opportunity to influence the initial development 
of CSS enabled UA's. 

I agree that UA could cache style sheets as the cache HTML documents, 
however URLs are not adequate as keys for caching. They indicate nothing 
about the version of the content identified, whether it was copied for 
somewhere else, etc. Think about the whole site replication issue - 
something a URL based caching scheme could deal with, but a UUID caching 
scheme could. In addition, my guess is that style sheets will become 
reusable licensable elements like Java applets. A UUID-keyed caching 
scheme would allow an author to publish a style sheet, multiple sites to 
use it and the UA to recogize that reuse.

Sincerely, 
Clark Breyman

Received on Sunday, 19 May 1996 15:59:32 UTC