How HTML 5 link prefetching can make your site load faster with one line of code

Re:How HTML 5 link prefetching can make your site load faste... by WillyF on Thursday June 03, 2010 @12:05AM (#1400353)

How will this affect web analytics? Let's say that Google chooses to prefetch the #1 result for any given search term. Will the #1 ranking site's analytics package report a unique visitor for every time that query is searched? If so, that would be a serious problem for those who rely on analytics.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How HTML 5 link prefetching can make your site load faste... by jeff18 on Thursday June 03, 2010 @12:23AM (#1400374)

It shouldn't affect Google Analytics and other JavaScript based analytics, but from the article,

* If this becomes popular it has the potential to skew logs and stats. Consider what happens when a bunch of prefetch requests are made to one of your pages, but the user never actually visits the page. The server (or stats package) doesn’t know the difference.

To clear this up, Firefox sends along an HTTP header, X-moz: prefetch, but you need some logic on the server side to detect it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How HTML 5 link prefetching can make your site load faste... by robgough on Thursday June 03, 2010 @05:39AM (#1400851)

Do you just count the prefetch for what it is... a "maybe" page view. Or when the browser shows the prefetched page can it send a "view" (or load it again in the background - but that seems wasteful).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How HTML 5 link prefetching can make your site load faste... by mseebach on Thursday June 03, 2010 @06:18AM (#1400892)

You'll only get the "maybe" hit, and never the real hit, so you can't accurately detect this on the serverside.

Javascript on the page isn't run until you actually visit the page, so that will be unaffected.

I don't think this is a big issue since JS-analytics are already superior to server-side log-analysis (caching alone).

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How HTML 5 link prefetching can make your site load faste... by WillyF on Thursday June 03, 2010 @12:29AM (#1400387)

That's what I thought, but I wasn't sure. Thanks.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How HTML 5 link prefetching can make your site load faste... by ilcesco on Thursday June 03, 2010 @05:50AM (#1400864)

Good point, it wouldn't affect javascript based stats, but it's surely going to mess up with webserver log-based analytics such as webalizer, awffull etc..

[ Parent | on HN ]