> : I think folding provides a nice intersection between two objectives ...
> : that of helping the user cope with information AND by helping the user
> : implicitly request less information up front reduce/manage network
> : traffic. Serving the user and network with the same feature!
>
> Well, you should still send the entire document over, so network
> traffic is still the same. The browser would store the entire
> document but render it selectively. The lag time would frustrate the
> users otherwise - almost a second to open up a level of a hierarchy.
There is a bandwidth/latency trade-off here, high bandwidth high latency wants
the whole document in one request, low bandwidth low latency you want to get
the small pieces you need. The high/low and low/high cases it is not clear
which is better. The various link technologies, caches and so on mean that all
combinations are possible and so there is no one-size-fits-all solution.
If hierarchical documents were linearized breadth-first rather than
depth-first you would get the overview before the detail. Anchors that expand
inline would get close to this, especially if backed up by some smart cacheing
and pre-fetching system. The trouble is that you get into some unpleasant
problems with partial documents taken out of context.
Regards,
Owen Rees <rtor@ansa.co.uk>
Information about ANSA is at <URL:http://www.ansa.co.uk/>.