Re: Toward Closure on HTML

Chris Lilley, Computer Graphics Unit (lilley@v5.cgu.mcc.ac.uk)
Thu, 7 Apr 1994 00:11:20 GMT


earhart+@CMU.EDUsaid
> I said:

>> Case 1: client has inline images ON and supports multipart messages, server
>> is multipart aware

> What if the server already happens to have some of the images cached?
> It seems like a waste to be constantly retransmitting the images.

True. But transmitting to the server what images it has cached incas eany of
those are in the current document seems too big an o verhead. As I said, from
the users point of view the delay is in establishing each connectiuon.
Retransmitting inline images seems better, IMHO I agree this is a flaw with the
suggested method, though.

>> Case 2: client has inline images OFF and supports multipart messages, server
>> is multipart aware

> Presumably with links of some sort, so that the images could be
> fetched later

Of course ... as I said, blah.html is transmitted as the current situation, so
the links are still in there. Presumably the browser wouls put small icons for
delayed image in those places where the inline images were not in the browser
cache, as at present.

> I still think that the current scheme of embedding URL's to images in
> lieu of the images is a good one.

I agree, and did not suggest otherwise in my original post. The idea is not to
remove the URLs or change the html in any way, but to predict that the browser
will ask for a bunch of inline images shortly, and send them all in a bunch.

> Granted, the need to reconnect for
> every image is annoying; it would be "nice" to be able to send multiple
> requests per connection to servers that didn't immediately close down...

Well that is the other way of doing it, and would also account for cached
images. Let the *browser* do the parsing, as at present; build up a list of
inline images not in the cache, then send this as a list of GETs in one request.
This would need more changes to the HTTP spec, though, I suspect.

Chris Lilley
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