TY - GEN
T1 - On Landing and Internal Web Pages
T2 - The Strange Case of Jekyll and Hyde in Web Performance Measurement
AU - Aqeel, Waqar
AU - Chandrasekaran, Balakrishnan
AU - Feldmann, Anja
AU - Maggs, Bruce M.
PY - 2020/10
Y1 - 2020/10
N2 - There is a rich body of literature on measuring and optimizing nearly every aspect of the web, including characterizing the structure and content of web pages, devising new techniques to load pages quickly, and evaluating such techniques. Virtually all of this prior work used a single page, namely the landing page (i.e., root document, "/"), of each web site as the representative of all pages on that site. In this paper, we characterize the differences between landing and internal (i.e., non-root) pages of 1000 web sites to demonstrate that the structure and content of internal pages differ substantially from those of landing pages, as well as from one another. We review more than a hundred studies published at top-tier networking conferences between 2015 and 2019, and highlight how, in light of these differences, the insights and claims of nearly two-thirds of the relevant studies would need to be revised for them to apply to internal pages.Going forward, we urge the networking community to include internal pages for measuring and optimizing the web. This recommendation, however, poses a non-trivial challenge: How do we select a set of representative internal web pages from a web site? To address the challenge, we have developed Hispar, a "top list" of 100,000 pages updated weekly comprising both the landing pages and internal pages of around 2000 web sites. We make Hispar and the tools to recreate or customize it publicly available.
AB - There is a rich body of literature on measuring and optimizing nearly every aspect of the web, including characterizing the structure and content of web pages, devising new techniques to load pages quickly, and evaluating such techniques. Virtually all of this prior work used a single page, namely the landing page (i.e., root document, "/"), of each web site as the representative of all pages on that site. In this paper, we characterize the differences between landing and internal (i.e., non-root) pages of 1000 web sites to demonstrate that the structure and content of internal pages differ substantially from those of landing pages, as well as from one another. We review more than a hundred studies published at top-tier networking conferences between 2015 and 2019, and highlight how, in light of these differences, the insights and claims of nearly two-thirds of the relevant studies would need to be revised for them to apply to internal pages.Going forward, we urge the networking community to include internal pages for measuring and optimizing the web. This recommendation, however, poses a non-trivial challenge: How do we select a set of representative internal web pages from a web site? To address the challenge, we have developed Hispar, a "top list" of 100,000 pages updated weekly comprising both the landing pages and internal pages of around 2000 web sites. We make Hispar and the tools to recreate or customize it publicly available.
KW - Web page performance
KW - PLT
KW - Speed Index
KW - top lists
KW - QoE
U2 - 10.1145/3419394.3423626
DO - 10.1145/3419394.3423626
M3 - Conference contribution
T3 - Proceedings of the ACM SIGCOMM Internet Measurement Conference, IMC
SP - 680
EP - 695
BT - IMC '20
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
CY - New York, NY, USA
ER -