[whatwg] Proposal: Link prerender events

[Gavin Peters (蓋文彼德斯)]

Hi Whatwg!

I'm continuing to work on <link rel=prerender>, an API in WebKit,
implemented by Chrome, which allows applications to request pages be loaded
early for faster navigation. This is a leading cause of 0ms navigations on
the web!

As we've explored this feature, we've continued to add to the API to allow
more applications to benefit from prerender, and measure that benefit. At
launch time, prerenders lasted 30s in Chrome before being removed to
prevent stale navigations. Now, the default is 5m, in part because we use
application removal of a <link rel=prerender ...> element as a signal to
kill the prerender, similar to the <applet> or <object> element.

I just wrote up a short proposal at:
http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Link_prerender_events discussing the next idea
we're working on.

By passing events to applications using prerenders, the applications will
better measure their use of prerender, and better control how they are
launched (serially or in parallel). The proposal has the details.

There's patches already in work to do this in WebKit and Chrome, see
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=96474 for WebKit and
http://codereview.chromium.org/10918189/ for the embarrassingly out of date
Chrome version of this patch.

In the current revision of the patch, these events are webkit prefixed. I
would rather clear that sooner rather than later, but I'm inexperienced
enough not to know when is appropriate. What does whatwg think?

Thanks!

- Gavin