Re: LYNX-DEV Making lynx faster - a la Netjet

[Jason Baker]

Andrew Kuchling writes:
> > Netjet is a Netscape plugin which starts to download the links from any
> > page as soon as it possible. Therefore, while you are reading a page, the
> > next is loading.
> 
>       No!  This is a *very* bad idea; consider a site like the
> Internet Movie Database at www.imdb.com.  At the IMDB, there are many
> links which point to CGI scripts that do a database search for an
> actor or movie; NetJet tries to download them all these links ahead of
> time, triggering many unnecessary database searches and causing the
> load on the servers to explode.  The IMDB now denies accesses from
> NetJet agents, I believe.

I agree - the possibilities for ugly explosions of network activity are 
pretty good.  I've seen some pages with 100's of links on them.  Yikes.

>       Someone on Usenet claims that the WebTV browser supports a new
> <LINK> tag which gives the URL of the probable next page, so the
> browser can start downloading it now.  Somewhat better, since it gives
> the author of the pages control, but probably only useful for very
> linear sequences of documents.

It could also be used to "prime your browsers image cache".  I think one
of the Babylon 5 sites has an image page you can go to, load all the
images, and then surf delay-free.  That <LINK> tag (LINK REV="cache"?)
might serve to do a similar function.

Of course, not much use for Lynx.  It already skips the image overhead. :)

Progressive display would be nice, though.

>       Andrew Kuchling

Jason

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