

HTML5 Link Prefetching (or "The Most Dangerous Tag") - imbiat
http://www.cloudspace.com/blog/2010/06/03/html5-link-prefetching-or-the-most-dangerous-tag/

======
someone_here
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.

~~~
timrosenblatt
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.

------
adamdecaf
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

------
mcotton
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.

~~~
timrosenblatt
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...](http://www.cloudspace.com/blog/2010/06/03/html5-link-prefetching-
or-the-most-dangerous-tag/)

