I’m trying to find a link to it but there was an incident based on this issue somewhere around 1999-2001 where Microsoft added a sort of prefetching thing to IE (or was it Netscape?!) and it would effectively click all the links on the page in order to get all the content in the cache.
Lots of us really didn’t know what we were doing and we’d made all the action buttons in the listing screens regular links. As you can imagine, pandemonium ensued.
Hey, at least we’d figured out that sql injection was a thing.
1997 we had this crazy notion of web "channels" (like RSS feeds), and offline viewing, where a client on a painfully slow dial-up connection could download and cache the resources required to display complex web pages.
Microsoft did this via an explicit web manifest; the web page author needed to list all of the resources they wanted to use in offline or pre-cache mode.
Netscape tried to do this by urging web authors to Be Very Careful with the links on a page, which usually required a specially-crafted offline-crawler-only version of the site. Predicably, hilarity ensued.
The term of art at the time was "push technology" or "web push", the irony of which was not lost upon those tasked with making it work.
