Rapid display of Web content: a simple method for prefetching Web files

Increasing the speed of access to Web sites, whose presentation relies more and more on sophisticated graphics and multimedia, is very desirable from the point of view of the home user connected via a voice-band modem and the emerging wireless subscriber market. More sophisticated modulation techniques, combined with better data compression, provide additional bandwidth at the expense of greater complexity. One often overlooked approach, which can provide almost zero latency, is that of prefetching (or ´preloading´) content ahead of its actual use. In certain application environments, where the user is likely to progress sequentially through the available material, prefetching graphics or text is a viable option. Obviously, this is undesirable. This article presents a simple approach to incorporating prefetching in a set of Web pages, which requires only minimal modification to the source HTML files. It does not require the client to load additional software or indeed even to be aware that prefetching is taking place.