[whatwg] Any way to submit only those parts of a form that have changed?

[Ian Hickson]

On Sat, 11 Dec 2004, dolphinling wrote:
>
> Saving bandwidth and processing power.
> 
> Think of something like Bugzilla. Every time anything is changed or a 
> comment is added, the entire form is resent--but usually only one or two 
> things have changed. Not only does this use many times more bandwidth 
> than it needs, but at the server everything has to be compared to see 
> whether it's changed or not.

I don't buy the bandwidth argument. This kind of thing doesn't even appear 
on the radar when compared to bittorrent or RSS traffic.

The processing power doesn't seem like a big thing either -- comparing 
strings is not that expensive, and you have to do it anyway, to test for 
data integrity and prevent invalid data from being submitted, etc. Not to 
mention that you'd have to do the comparisons anyway to support down-level 
clients.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'