Re: FYI: Mozilla's Resource Packages

All this resource package thing looks like a general preloading
mechanism...

If we use standard URLs, we can catch things like:
-compression
-content-type
-caching questions
because it is already specified and out there.

Using javascript (and/or other tricks), we can even preload right now.
-- So, what is missing?

>From the proposal (http://limi.net/articles/resource-packages/ ) I see
only one goal left over:
-serve everything in a single HTTP request, freeing up the other
parallel requests to fetch resources that are page-specific

Why not use pipelining?? So, my alternatives are:

-use more parallel connections to the same server
-improve pipelining by specifying what to pipeline and in which order
-foster HTTP over SCTP


I definitively do not see the Resource Package approach to be the answer
to the problem.


Robert

On Wed, 2009-11-18 at 10:43 +0530, Srirama ChandraSekhar wrote:
> Hi,
> The idea looks very good. But I want to point out one scenario which
> should be considered before going forward with this approach. Consider
> a text only browser or a browser which doesn't want to display images
> or doesn't want to execute javascript or doesn't support java script
> (may be through settings change by the user), in this case the browser
> will download the resource package file only to find that it has
> unnecessarily downloaded many images and javascript file which are not
> going to be used. To address this may be we can add some header
> through which browsers should be able to tell the servers what
> resources should the resource package file contain.
> 
> Regards,
> Sriram
> 
> On Tue, Nov 17, 2009 at 8:19 PM, Anthony Bryan
> <anthonybryan@gmail.com> wrote:
>         http://limi.net/articles/resource-packages/
>         
>         Making browsers faster: Resource Packages
>         
>         A proposal to make downloading web page resources faster in
>         all browsers.
>         
>         Introduction & Rationale
>         
>         What if there was a backwards compatible way to transfer all
>         of the
>         resources that are used on every single page in your site —
>         CSS, JS,
>         images, anything else — in a single HTTP request at the start
>         of the
>         first visit to the page? This is what Resource Package support
>         in
>         browsers will let you do.
>         
>         Implementation
>         
>         While Zip files do not have not the most elegant or efficient
>         packing
>         format out there, they have the following very desirable
>         traits:
>         
>            * Easily available reference implementations.
>            * Can be unpacked even in partial state — which means that
>         we can
>         stream the file, and put CSS and JavaScript first in the
>         archive, and
>         they will unpacked and made available before the entire file
>         has been
>         downloaded.
>            * Excellent toolchain support, zip/unzip is available on
>         all major
>         platforms, so it’s easy for web developers to use.
>         
>         We propose this markup to signal a zipped resource package:
>         
>         <link rel="resource-package"
>              type="application/zip"
>              href="site-resources.zip" />
>         
>         
>         --
>         (( Anthony Bryan ... Metalink [ http://www.metalinker.org ]
>          )) Easier, More Reliable, Self Healing Downloads
>         
>

Received on Wednesday, 18 November 2009 06:09:44 UTC