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

I would agree with this. My initial thought when reading the proposal was
SPDY as well.

That said, there is ongoing discussion about improving the app-cache that
is also relevant[1]. I am also planning on opening a discussion about
programmatic control of a cache (probably not piggy-backed onto app-cache,
which has important atomicity guarantees and no programmatic control, but
possibly piggy-backed off of the File API). Between SPDY, improving app
cache semantics, and a clean way to programmatically store remote assets
that can be loaded via <script>, <link> and <img> tags, I think we have a
solution that does not require creating a new packaging format.

[1] https://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=14702

Yehuda Katz
(ph) 718.877.1325


On Tue, Feb 14, 2012 at 10:26 AM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com>wrote:

> 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
>
>