Prefetch issues

[Eric]

As described, the link prefetching capability seems to have some limitations that work counter to the performance of the page using it.

It appears as though LINK elements are metadata elements and that these may only be supported inside the HEAD of the document. If so, then this is an issue in the real world, because at the time a web server flushes chunks containing the HEAD section of a document, the links we would want to prefetch are often not known. This is true for all the large sites I've analyzed or worked at. For example, many pages on a site will contain the same visual header, and we want to flush the HEAD and visual header content while the server is in the process of figuring out what the content of the page will be - which will contain the links we'd like to prefetch.

Am I reading this correctly? Or is there a something that would allow the flushing scenario I describe above?

One of the simplest approaches may be to add support for rel="prefetch" to A and AREA's, but it's been explicitly excluded from those. Why?

Another approach could be to allow LINK throughout the document. This would allow for prefetching content like images even if you didn't know them at HEAD rendering time.

Any opinions?

[zcorpan]

Sounds reasonable; I suggest you send this feedback to the whatwg list or file a bug in W3C bugzilla.