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List:       mozilla-ui
Subject:    Re: Feature proposal: Pre-select links
From:       Bryce Harrington <bryce () neptune ! net>
Date:       1998-05-27 18:20:20
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Angus Davis wrote:
> The concept of pre-fetching links is behind many "net accelerator" products. How
> could we enable pre-fetching while avoiding these problems:
>
> 1. No content developer intervention required (eliminate reliance on "link"
> tags...)
> 2. Minimal end-user intervention required (no reliance on having the user
> pre-select links to fetch)
> 3. Bandwidth kindness (don't waste bandwidth by downloading tons of content the
> user doesn't want)

IMHO, providing 2 solutions, one which breaks #1, the other which breaks
#2, would be the ideal.  I'd be worried that an option which fills all
three of the above criteria might be easily abused.  But here's a
possible idea:

When a page is downloaded, all of the links on the page are stored in a
list.  A score is assigned to each link.  If the link appears on the
page once, it's given a score of one.  The score is incremented by one
for each additional time it appears on the page.  If the link is present
at the top of the page (say, is one of the first 10 links on the page),
it's score is increased by 2.  If it's in the second 10, it's given a 1.

Once all the scores have been calculated, the browser will start
downloading the text of the page with the highest score.  

There's some optional things that can be done by the user and the page
designer to control this behavior.  Each time the user "hovers" the
mouse over a link, the link's score is increased by one.  The page
author can also assign popularity numbers to links: "<A href=www.url.com
pop=4>".  The link with the highest popularity that isn't already in the
buffer will have its score incremented by 1.

Perhaps the web server could be modified to produce a "page ranking" for
a given url based on how "popular" it has been in the last week or so.
This page ranking could modify the score as well.

The link's score could also be increased if the link appears in other
downloaded pages.  This would be really handy for pre-loading little
icons and things that appear on lots of pages of a site.

Bryce Harrington
bryce @ alumni.caltech.edu

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