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The naive implementation of this ruins all the elegance of caching which is very important in modern websites. You end up choosing between getting all the comm

The naive implementation of this ruins all the elegance of caching which is very important in modern websites. You end up choosing between getting all the common elements shoved down the wire at you every time or invariably having to go back for the few images unique to the page that you missed. We're in the middle of a research projects right now where the server automatically constructs cache groups and does this properly. It was one of the things the guys working on spdy and us talked about, but they are taking a slightly different approach. We'll see what happens, but this is the direction we want to move as well.

jerf 17y ago
In my model, the webserver knows what the "extra few images" are and could send them to you as part of the first burst. First-order caching (no proxying, just server and client) can be handled by having the client also smart enough to send up all the caching info at once. How to handle proxy caches cleanly isn't immediately obvious to me, but there's far more tools with this approach than the zip file approach. Certainly with work I think it could be solved. Again, to a first order, the proxy would have to accept this style too and do something intelligent with it; an old-style proxy would fall back on the current system. It is not clear to me: Are you the one proposing this zip file thing, or someone in another group that is working on this? If the latter, I wouldn't mind seeing a link, perhaps even submitted to HN.
- djcapelis 17y ago
  I'm in a completely separate group in a completely separate place who happens to have seen this link before. We haven't done anything worth linking to yet, just have a little bit of knowledge about this area since we've been looking at it as well. What you're saying is close to what we've been looking at trying to turn into code. I think the proxy thing is a non-issue. In fact a proxy in many ways could implement a portion of the server-side smartness and accelerate conforming clients on websites that don't implement this. These are some larger issues though, I think: 1) Making the server smart enough to actually do this. 2) Sending the resources in the right order (It turns out the order things go down the line can be significant and this is something that can vary depending on which web rendering engine your user has.) 3) This requires changes to HTTP, unlike the linked proposal, so one needs a way to do it right and a compact representation of the cache information.

jerf 17y ago

In my model, the webserver knows what the "extra few images" are and could send them to you as part of the first burst. First-order caching (no proxying, just server and client) can be handled by having the client also smart enough to send up all the caching info at once. How to handle proxy caches cleanly isn't immediately obvious to me, but there's far more tools with this approach than the zip file approach. Certainly with work I think it could be solved. Again, to a first order, the proxy would have to accept this style too and do something intelligent with it; an old-style proxy would fall back on the current system. It is not clear to me: Are you the one proposing this zip file thing, or someone in another group that is working on this? If the latter, I wouldn't mind seeing a link, perhaps even submitted to HN.

djcapelis 17y ago
I'm in a completely separate group in a completely separate place who happens to have seen this link before. We haven't done anything worth linking to yet, just have a little bit of knowledge about this area since we've been looking at it as well. What you're saying is close to what we've been looking at trying to turn into code. I think the proxy thing is a non-issue. In fact a proxy in many ways could implement a portion of the server-side smartness and accelerate conforming clients on websites that don't implement this. These are some larger issues though, I think: 1) Making the server smart enough to actually do this. 2) Sending the resources in the right order (It turns out the order things go down the line can be significant and this is something that can vary depending on which web rendering engine your user has.) 3) This requires changes to HTTP, unlike the linked proposal, so one needs a way to do it right and a compact representation of the cache information.