Browser document selection based on performance

Ken Fox (fox@pt0204.pto.ford.com)
Mon, 11 Jul 1994 16:50:17 -0400 (EDT)


I wrote:

> > references. Hmm... another style question: Do people prefer one giant
> > document with internal references, or many small documents with external
> > references?

Mary Morris responds:

> This really depends on who the audience is, what type of client-side
> stuff they have... For example, if you are only publishing internal to
> your company, have a good network, and the users have browsers that
> can efficiently manage one large chapter file, you should do it.
>
> However, if your audience has a slow network or a less than robust
> browser, break it into smaller chunks. People aren't going to
> read something if it is time consuming and annoying to get the
> data in the first place.

This looks like it should be something that a browser should send to an HTTP
server --- similar to the accept stuff. Is there any way of deciding what
to send a browser on the basis of the browser's and/or network's performance?
It would be nice if some performance metrics could be agreed upon --- things
like Kilobytes per second transfer, or Kilobytes per currency-unit transfer,
or Kilobytes per how-fast-I-read, etc.

This is related to some interesting discussion that started concerning the
association of accept types with browser types. Is it sufficient to always
talk about capability, and not about preference, performance or cost?

- Ken

-- 
Ken Fox, fox@pt0204.pto.ford.com, (313)59-44794
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