HTML5 Link Prefetching (or "The Most Dangerous Tag") | Hacker News Reader

HTML5 Link Prefetching (or "The Most Dangerous Tag")

cloudspace.com

9 pointsimbiat6 comments

Saying this will hurt users is like saying gasoline will hurt a car since it could ignite. Obviously take care of it, and it will obviously improve your users experience.

Of course. It's a useful feature. My point was that a simple misunderstanding by a front end person "Oh, this will make our site load faster" could actually take down a site.

I hope that it makes front-end and back-end people more aware of how they're connected.

But you are right. Often, "dangerous" things, when used responsibly, can be good.

Which is probably why he didn't say that. The article has useful information and cautions people to think through the consequences before using the feature. It doesn't claim, at any point, that the feature will hurt the users.

I read through the spec a little[0], the thing with this attribute that I'm worried about is if the page is rendered or of scripts are executed. If they are (mainly scripts) then you could see a legitimate website become attacked and have these placed in without anyone knowing or detecting for possibly several days.

     [0]: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/types.html#type-links

It seems like something new to check for on your DB heavy pages. You could ignore requests with that header if your servers can't handle the additional traffic.

That's a very good idea. I'm going to edit the article, hat tip to you.

Edit: done http://www.cloudspace.com/blog/2010/06/03/html5-link-prefetc...

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