Re: jar protocol (was: ZIP archive API?)

* Robin Berjon wrote:
>I wonder if we couldn't have a mechanism that would not require a 
>separate URI scheme. Just throwing this against the wall, might be daft:
>
>We add a new <link> relationship: bundle (archive is taken, bikeshed 
>later). The href points to the archive, and there can be as many as 
>needed. The resolved absolute URL for this is added to a list of bundles 
>(there is no requirement on when this gets fetched, UAs can do so 
>immediately or on first use depending on what they wish to optimise for).
>
>After that, whenever there is a fetch for a resource the URL of which is 
>a prefix match for this bundle the content is obtained from the bundle.

There have been many proposals over the years that would allow for some-
thing like this, http://www.w3.org/TR/DataCache/ for instance, allows to
"intercept" certain requests to aid in supporting offline applications,
and `registerProtocolHandler` combined with `web+`-schemes go into a si-
milar direction. Those seem more worthwhile to explore to me than your
one-trick-strawman.

Also, it is not clear to me that avoiding a special scheme is a useful
design constraint (not to mention that "bundling" is something the com-
puter is supposed to do for me, so I would want to get that out of my
face). But I can see value in a more generic feature that allows me to
implement and reference IO objects as I see fit, which would provide for
"bundling" features.

>This means no URL scheme to be supported by everyone, [...]

Well, `rel='bundle'` would have to be supported by "everyone", because
past critical mass there would be too many "nobody noticed the fallback
is not working until now" cases, so that seems rather uninteresting in
the longer term.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
Am Badedeich 7 · Telefon: +49(0)160/4415681 · http://www.bjoernsworld.de
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Received on Tuesday, 7 May 2013 20:35:35 UTC