After spending the last 20 minutes dealing with a certain popular website editing program, rhymes with DreenBeaver, I got to thinking. First a bit of background. Anytime you visit a website your browser downloads a copy of every page you look at. This is commonly known as caching.
The reason your browser caches any visited website is on the off chance you visit it again, it already has the information. If you do visit the page again, your browser will check to see if the page has expired. If it has not, then it will display the cached version instead of downloading a fresh copy.
Now since a large majority of the web is text, this works pretty well. I say pretty well because there is one technology missing that would really make life better especially in lower bandwidth situations. Incremental updates.
What I proposal in the caching process is instead of the browser downloading everything again, only download the pieces that have changed. It's a novel concept I know and some may argue it may not do much good....well until you think about it.
The amount of data downloaded that does not change could potentially be tremendous. If a designer adds a few lines of code to either a page, or a stylesheet, or any combination of the above then imagine the bandwidth savings.
If your browser understands incremental text changes then we are off to a good start. The next step is incremental binary. Images, Video, Podcasts, any of these could benefit from changing the way data is presented. Impossible you say? Dropbox has found a way to handle it.
Think it would do any good?
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