HPP: HTML macro-preprocessing to support dynamic document caching
Fred Douglis, Antonio de Haro Bailón, Michael Rabinovich · 1997
A number of techniques are available for reducing latency and bandwidth requirements for resources on the World Wide Web, including caching, compression, and delta-encoding [12]. These approaches are limited: much data on the Web is dynamic, for which traditional caching is of limited use, and delta-encoding requires both a common version base against which to apply a delta and the complete generation of the resource prior to encoding it. In contrast to these approaches, we take an application-specific view, in which we separate the static and dynamic portions of a resource. The static portions (called the template) can then be cached, with (presumably small) dynamic portions obtained on each access. Our HTML extension, which we refer to as HPP (for HTML Pre-Processing) supports resources that contain variable number of static and dynamic elements, such as query responses. Results with macro-encoding of query response resources from local CGI scripts and two popular search engines indicate that our approach promises a substan-Copyright to this work is retained by the authors. Permission is granted for the noncommercial reproduction of the complete work for educational or research purposes.