On the Horizon

As you've seen, the ability to compress both static and dynamic content by more than 80 percent can be incorporated into all major web servers. Users are already seeing significant improvement in download speeds. Nowhere is this more evident than when searching the web. Those of us who use Google can see the accelerated response times.

Even though compression offers significant improvements, there is still much work to be done in the area of content acceleration. Delta encoding is a proposed extension to the HTTP 1.1 protocol (RFC 3229) [14] that will allow browsers to receive only content that has changed relative to other content on the page. Although companies are starting to embrace this technology, it has several limitations when delivering dynamic content, which by its very nature generates entirely new pages rather than smaller sections.

[14] Jeffrey C. Mogul et al., "Delta Encoding in HTTP," RFC 3229 [online], (Reston, VA: The Internet Society, 2002), available from the Internet at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc3229.txt.

Of more interest is the ability to reduce the latency effect incurred while requesting web pages. Latency (the amount of time taken for the response to reach the web server and for the web server to reply) is significant in wireless infrastructures ( narrowband ). Often referred to as pipelining, this new feature is available in some browsers, but the majority of web servers (nearly the entire installed base) does not know how to process this request.

A more innovative approach would be the use of a special thin client that communicates directly with a modified server, allowing not only the numerous GET requests to be joined into a single request but also provide the ability to offer bi-directional optimization of other protocols from within the client. For example, the ability to send HTML email already pre-compressed from your client device over a narrowband connection would be of tremendous benefit to the wireless community. Once at the server, it can be decompressed and forwarded to a regular SMTP server.

 



Speed Up Your Site[c] Web Site Optimization
Speed Up Your Site[c] Web Site Optimization
ISBN: 596515081
EAN: N/A
Year: 2005
Pages: 135

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