Globally Progressive Interactive Web Delivery

Jeffrey M. Gilbert and Robert W. Brodersen

This paper suggests that since web browsing is an interactive process and downloading a web page can take sev-eral seconds to several minutes over slow links, the information presented to the user during this time is important. We present new metrics and visualization techniques to illustrate and quantify web page loading. Given the insight afforded by the metrics, we propose a methodology to improve web access using a new technique, globally progressive interactive web delivery. This technique views the web delivery process as the remote display of a web page and entails applying progressive coding to the document transmission process in its entirety. It also allows the user to explicitly direct link bandwidth to images of interest. This globally progressive interactive framework has been prototyped without modifying either existing web browsers or servers through the use of a web proxy and browser-side Java applets. The framework allows for both protocol and image compression research in a platform-independent manner. Directions of current work on integrating the architecture into existing web infrastructure for greater performance and scalability are discussed.