Support for Link Prefetching

Hey there,

I was thinking about how to speed up navigation and remembered the case where some flickr pictures were getting deleted because some browsers where prefetching links. But, flickr had implemented DELETE as GET… ¬_¬ lovely!

Anyway, these days HTML supports adding prefetch (and the likes) hints to the browser so it speeds up certain aspects of the navigation.

As part of that, there’s also lazy loading images (which could be its own separate GH issue)… A quick search in this repository gave me a couple of hints that the library we’re using to render images already support it (?).

[gliechtenstein]

Aha, that makes sense! Yeah I think this is something we could potentially support in the future. Let’s sit on it for a while 😃

p.s. If anyone comes across this and has some ideas on why this will be useful for them, feel free to comment.

[gtramontina]

But what if we have 500 items on the screen, each with different link?

This is why it would come labeled as use judiciously… 😄 This shouldn’t be enabled by default.

Here’s a sketch of what I have in mind…

{
  "type": "label",
  "text": "Push me",
  "href": {
    "url": "https://www.jasonclient.org/next.json",
    "prefetch": "true"
  }
}

There’s a lot more to prefetching, but the immediate benefit I see here is to provide a smoother transition between screens, and the example above tries to reflect that.