Client header for connection speed info

Many sites and their users can benefit from the provision of more than one 
http interface to a site - for example, the increasingly widespread 
bandwidth discrepancy between standard modem and broadband connections may 
encourage developers to produce both high- and low-bandwidth versions of a 
site.

Many sites implement this but rely on the user to manually select which site 
they "prefer".

If the site developer knew what the user's average download times were upon 
their arrival, then this could be used to automatically determine what level 
of information to display to the user before the first URL is actually 
served.

I suggest that a client side header (for example "Avg Speed: 38552" 
representing bits per second, say, could be useful. It is the responsibility 
of the client to calculate and maintain this figure based on their average 
or maximum download speeds over the duration of a browsing session.

The header should obviously remain optional in any client implementation, 
but the benefit of supplying it is high.

tam

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Received on Thursday, 2 March 2000 12:57:10 UTC