HTTP: The Definitive Guide

Delta Encoding

We have described different versions of a web page as different instances of a page. If a client has an expired copy of a page, it requests the latest instance of the page. If the server has a newer instance of the page, it will send it to the client, and it will send the full new instance of the page even if only a small portion of the page actually has changed.

Rather than sending it the entire new page, the client would get the page faster if the server sent just the changes to the client’s copy of the page (provided that the number of changes is small). Delta encoding is an extension to the HTTP protocol that optimizes transfers by communicating changes instead of entire objects. Delta encoding is a type of instance manipulation, because it relies on clients and servers exchanging information about particular instances of an object. RFC 3229 describes delta encoding.

Figure 15-10 illustrates more clearly the mechanism of requesting, generating, receiving, and applying a delta-encoded document. The client has to tell the server which version of the page it has, that it is willing to accept a delta from the latest version of page, and which algorithms it knows for applying those deltas to its current version. The server has to check if it has the client’s version of the page and how to compute deltas from the latest version and the client’s version (there are several algorithms for computing the difference between two objects). It then has to compute the delta, ...