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Delta encoding for HTTP has been proposed since 2002[0], but seems to have been lukewarmly received. A fully server-side solution will probably bypass most pro

• obtu 14y ago
  This deals with the protocol and leaves the diff tool pluggable (RFC 3284's vcdiff is suggested), so it looks like something railgun could be using internally. Google's SDCH (mentioned in CloudFlare's post) is an alternative that isn't tied to a single URL, but involves prefetching some data that may or may not be needed, so it's a bit hacky. An interesting approach would be to hook into a template engine to generate a page skeleton with dictionary references. That would allow reordering the small, newly generated varying snippets before the large common ones; both could be preemptively pushed using SPDY to avoid round-trips.
  • jgrahamc 14y ago
    The really big problem with SDCH is that is places a burden on the web site owner to generate dictionaries and to know when to generate them and how. The protocol is one thing, the reality is another and that's why it has not been widely adopted.
  • justincormack 14y ago
    Which more or less describes ESI though, a page template with bits to fill in...