Originally formalized as a specification to be approved by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) back in 2001, ESI was thought to be a way of stepping up to the challenge of web infrastructure scaling by applying edge computing to it. Edge computing is a method of optimizing cloud computing by doing data processing near the source of the data instead of centralizing all data processing in the datacenter. In the case of ESI, the idea was to decentralize web page content to the logical extremes of the network in order to avoid having all content requests being sent to the web server every time.
The specification called for new HTML tags that would allow HTTP cache servers to determine if certain parts of a page needed ...
