Re: Flash in the pan

From: Chris Stowell <chris_stowell_at_yahoo.co.uk>
Date: Mon 15 May 2000 10:49:28 +0100 (BST)

BRAD JENSEN WROTE:
> Well, tricky and cute can be an attention getter.
> What would be really nice is if the browser had a
> way of reporting the connection speed of the user
> on the first page access.

Well you can, in a limited way. FT.com has been doing
it for some time now by measuring the response time on
a simple transaction on the first page. The longer it
takes the slower your connection is assumed to be, and
the level of graphical complexity on the homepage is
adjusted according to that assumed connection speed.

While I'm not sure exactly how they do it in this
example, in principle it would be possible to set up
the detection in ASP, PHP and JSP (and probably Perl)
and with a bit of benchmarking then it'd be fairly
accurate. Setting a cookie with the results of the test
would mean that a user wouldn't have to go through the
process again.

Regards

Chris




Received on Mon May 15 2000 - 04:49:28 CDT