Static

This page is about a tag called static or locked that marks a portion of the page as not to be refreshed when refreshing or navigating to another page on the site.

Use Case Description

Often some parts of the page on a site do not change in content, size and position on a given page or pages on a site. These parts shouldn't be redrawn when refreshing or navigating to a different page with the same elements. These elements are usually navigation bars, logos and legal disclamers on the bottom.

Current Limitations

There is no such tag at current, and though pics are stored in the browser cache, they are re-rendered every time the page or a similar one loads.

Current Usage and Workarounds

Frames work around this problem, but they are not widely used, and have problems which make them unpopular

Benefits

Browsing through a list of search results would become faster, also browsing through sites with many graphical elements

Proposed Solutions

My Solution

The solution would be to introduce <static> and </static> tags that would include the attributes static_url for the site and a static_id for the class of documents. For example <static static_url=whatwg.org static_id=001> insert code for the navigation bar </static static_id=001>

Then the browser would know on the next page that url and id are identical and just redraw the part of the screen corresponding to the code inside <static></static>. Through the id, a site can also adopt different static elements like navigation bars for different sections of the site. An alternative to the number would be a keyword like static_id="navbar1"

Processing Model

The browser would need a bitmap cache for the static documents of the current website, or possibly the n last visited websites together with their positions on the page. Misuse should be difficult, since the website has to be one currently displayed. It doesn't work on pages on servers with different top domains, but that would be a case occurring seldomly.

Limitations

It doesn't work on pages on organizations with different top domains e.g. wikipedia vs. wikibooks etc., but that would be a case occurring not too often.

Implementation

Implementation on the browser seems straight forward, since redrawing parts of the screen is easy. It wouldn't work with sites that do not specify exact sizes for elements.

Adoption

Faster rendering. A site with lots of graphics (ESPN) would (re)load nearly as fast as a site with text only. Certainly ads would still have to reload, so it might not be that faster everywhere