Thanks for the reply.
I periodically grab & examine the TempInternetFiles from a gaming PC
that my son runs outside our home firewall. Here's an example an "in-the-wild" of an occurrence found in his cache. It is apparently from the
www.ah-ha.com site:
[ IMG SRC="http://a1356.g.akamai.net/f/1356/6149/7d/partner.ah-ha.com/images/clear.gif" HEIGHT="2" WIDTH="1" ]
I think I have "ah-ha.com" in my AdDomains blocklist.
(It's a crappy schmooze/pay -for-ranking search engine site)
You should be able to trigger the filter by visiting there.
positional variables:
The $SET thingie is just a way of placing a reminder/comment mid-filter.
All the others reflect my habit of using positional vars in place of asterisks while developing a filter (I tend to insert replacements like "___1___2___" so that I can quickly see the result in a page's view-source or in the replacement box of the Prox filter test window. I just forgot to change them to asterisks before posting this "finished" filter. Think there's much performance impact by leaving in the positional variables? I played with this a while back, and can't remember seeing much difference (vars vs asterisks).
size (height/width dimensions):
In all my other filters, I've chosen to ignore dimensions when filtering.
For instance, my version of "kill offsite images" removes ALL images. Through the years of dialup 'net access, I learned to use (and to appreciate, when surfing) webpages that preload images which will be required within a page later in the pageset... so I don't want to "punish" the continued practice of preloading. Even with a cable modem, pageloads at sites (art sites) that employ preloading can seem quite a bit "snappier".
-=-
In this filter though, the rationale is that if I visit a site frequently and know that ALL their images are Akamai-cached, I'll list 'em in a bypass list called by the filter. For other/unknown sites, I guess I'm willing to "lose" the little images (whether they're innocuous or not) for the sake of not tying up so many concurrent TCP connections. This would seem to suit the "way I surf", continually shift-clicking links and tabbing between scads of browser windows (rather than [cough] patiently waiting for each page to load).
I don't know yet if the difference in load-time will be noticable.
Although I found dozens of references to "clear.gif" I'm sure Akamai has several other "reusable" beacon images in their stable. As the filter evolves, instead of "OR -ing " the size and filname arguments, maybe I'll "AND" them,
and just ennumerate the known "reusable" image filenames.
