Time in view before prefetching

[cornelg7]

One way to solve the many prefetch calls on a page and still have a fast experience would be to add the possibility to pass a time argument to the prefetch attribute. It could look like this prefetch?: 'visible' | 'hover' | 'time'.

• prefetch 'time' with time 0 would just be prefetch 'visible'
• prefetch 'time' with time 1000 would wait for the element to be in view for 1 second before prefetching

Also, after testing a page, you can see what links are hotter (are accessed more) than others and set them a lower prefetch time than the links that are not clicked as much.

Good idea yay or nay?

[onmax]

I like this idea, and I took some time to improve it a bit with more options. Let me know what you think!

For the shake of simplicity and flexibility I would allow two options:

• prefetchOn: Defines the action that user needs to do in order to prefetch the link. The possible values are:
  • visible: Show when link is visible in the screen. It will default value
  • hocus: Combination of hover + focus
• prefetchAfter: Defines the delay in ms before the prefetch actually starts. Default value undefined

This would be as global config, but I think it would be useful if we allow to overwrite this parameter individually in each link with data attributes optinally. In the code can look like:

<a href="./link.html" data-prefetch-on="hocus" />
<a href="./link.html" data-prefetch-after="500" />

<!-- Combining them -->
<a href="./link.html" data-prefetch-on="visible" data-prefetch-after="200" />

In summary

• New global conf called prefetchOn: 'visible' | 'hocus'.
• New global conf called prefetchAfter: number: Amount of ms it should wait after the prefetch is triggered.
• New data-attributes called data-prefetch-on= 'visible' | 'hocus'
• New data-attributes called data-prefetch-after

[DarrinTisdale]

I'm really interested in this approach, and after seeing the work done, I'd like to help in some way.

BTW I have some ideas on prefetching that would extend the functionality, making it work for certain types of use cases. I don't think the discussion belongs here, so I will detail it in a separate post, something akin to a feature request.

[ekwoka]

Looks good, could probably include configs for opting in prefetching on specific links as well as opting out.