Re: CfC: Proposal to add web packaging / asset compression

On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 1:24 AM, Paul Bakaus <pbakaus@zynga.com> wrote:
> Hi everybody,
>
> This is a proposal to add a packaging format transparent to browsers to the
> charter. At Zynga, we have identified this as one of our most pressuring
> issues. Developers want to be able to send a collection of assets to the
> browser through a single request, instead of hundreds.
>
> Today, we misuse image and audio sprites, slicing them again as base64 only
> to put them into weird caches. These are workarounds, and ugly ones, as
> well. None of the workarounds is satisfying, either in terms of robustness,
> performance or simply, a sane API. Coincidentally, this is also one of the
> most pressuring issues of WebGL. Since you are dealing with a lot of assets
> with WebGL games, proper solutions must be found.

I was once a believer in an approach like this, and supported previous
attempts at it like Mozilla's use of a zip + virtual paths.

Now, though, SPDY seems to be moving along nicely enough that we don't
really need to worry about this.  It's already supported in Chrome and
Firefox, and it lets you pull multiple assets in a single connection,
push assets that haven't yet been requested, and prioritize asset
retrieval.  I don't feel there's any real need to worry about asset
packaging formats anymore.

~TJ

Received on Tuesday, 14 February 2012 18:27:11 UTC