html 5 performance suggestion.

HTML 5 introduced the Manifest feature for offline applications.

However the content delivery for the items in the Manifest are still single
URL references.

 

Have you ever considered that web pages are really like Multi-part e-mails.

They consist of many files to render. Yet the HTML language has no facility
to request multiple items in a single http request.

 

I would like to suggest that a new tag or attribute be added to the
language.

This would allows an archive file containing many files to be downloaded at
once, and be made available to the page.

 

This could reduce the http traffic for a typical web page to as little as 2
http requests.

For https requests it would reduce the number of times, that the browser
would need to check the content for being authentic.

 

I really don't care what you call this tag, but here is an proposal:

I am not limiting the archive format to be *.gz either, it could just as
well be a tar, jar, zip file or even a lib

 

<archive src="archive_of_css_and_js.gz" alt="These files are static.">

<archive src="archive_of_images.gz"        alt="These files are dynamically
changing often">

 

These .gz files contains dozens of files, which would be placed into the
browser cache just as a single download file would be.

When a reference to a file is made, then the file would already be in cache.

There is one other thing I should mention, normally when each file is
fetched, the header attributes such as expires, cookies, etag, . are tied to
the retrieval.  In the archive file, it should be possible to have a second
file for each file which sets header fields tied to the member file.  This
is bridging the gap between http and html.

 

When these files were needed they would already be in the browser cache.

<script src="abc.js"

<img src="abc.gif"

<video src="abc.mp4"

 

Thanks,

Peter Lenahan  Peter_Lenahan  at ibi dot com