http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=565470

perlmonkey2 has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

This isn't so much about Mechanize as it is about being gentle with webservers. If I'm just looking to spider a domain, looking for text, when examining links for where to go next, would this be the best way to only get HTML and be gentle to the webserver: 1. Regex the links for non-html extensions, keeping everything else as a possibility. 2. HEAD $url for text/html and charset info, if is_html and a good charset/no charset. 3. GET Instead of doing the HEAD, I could just do a get, and check the header info and body for good HTML, but I thought just getting the header would be easier on the webserver even if it meant two seperate connections had to be made.