Parlez-vous Internet?

Posted on 2 Jul 2002 at 17:35

If you can't speak the Net lingo, don't worry, as Davey Winder has all the answers - in good old plain English.

Web site cacheing works by storing copies of the pages of popular sites on a local server - at your ISP, for example - so doing away with the need for you to visit the original site directly when you want to download information. Your on-line access time is reduced as you're only making a connection request to your local host server for the pages, which is likely to be much less congested and therefore quicker than going directly to the site in question. Such proxy servers have been an accepted method for side-stepping Web congestion for years now, and most of the larger ISPs offer this facility.

On a more personal level, your Web browser is likely to support cacheing: you define the maximum size of this local storage and the software will automatically hold page data on your hard disk after you visit various sites. The next time you visit those pages they seem to load much faster because you already have the graphics and so on stored locally.

Hey, a solution that actually works - what could possibly be wrong with that? Why not direct that question to the guys who are charged with producing the really big Web sites - the ones which need cacheing most of all thanks to their tendency to graphical bloat. You see, these guys also have the minor post-production problem of making their sites pay, and that generally means attracting more hits to satisfy their advertisers. They see the introduction of cacheing technologies as a disaster, because the more people cache their pages, the lower their daily hit rate, and the fewer advertisements they can sell.

For sites that are news-based, there's another obvious pitfall: if you're not careful about your cacheing activities, you'll get old news delivered instead of the latest stuff. A casual user may well blame the site itself for being slow to keep up with the flow of things, and the site loses business as a result.

But it goes even further than that, methinks. The big boys also know that cacheing makes the task of tracking individual visitors impossible, which is yet another marketing tool to attract the advertisers removed. I've even heard accusations flying around that people with caches are 'stealing our content' or 'infringing our copyright', when the truth is that all they're doing is making the Web tolerable.

Improving the on-line experience is paramount if the Web is to continue to develop, and that development is vital to the growth of these very firms making the fuss. The answer to their advertising woes is as obvious as it is simple - back off from bloating your sites, introduce leaner and faster designs, give the information a chance to flow. At the end of the day people are visiting sites for their content, their true core content and not the fancy wrapping it comes packaged in. This is one particular catch-22 situation with a way out, but I wonder how many Web site producers are willing to backtrack and take it.

Ask the Net head

Every month I'll be tackling your questions, which you can email to me at the addresses shown at the end of these pages or post care of the PC Pro offices if you're not yet on-line. So, if you can't get your modem to connect, don't understand how to bring your Web browser alive with sound, or maybe just have a seemingly impossible problem with your Internet connection, get your letters in and I'll do my best to answer them.

From: Rob

Problem: 'I've been considering upgrading my Net connection to ISDN for some time now, but the recent hoo-ha in the news about Internet access using electricity lines has made me stop in my tracks. How does it work, how fast is it in reality and who do I contact to get an account?'

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