Re: jar protocol

Hi Brian,

On 10/05/2013 15:32 , Brian Kardell wrote:
> Would it be possible (not suggesting this would be the  common story) to
> reference a zipped asset directly via the full url, sans a link tag?

Can you hash out a little bit more how this would work? I'm assuming you 
mean something like:

   <img src='/bundle.zip/img/dahut.jpg'>

Without any prior set up on the client to indicate that /bundle.zip is a 
bundle. This causes the browser to issue GET /bundle.zip/img/dahut.jpg

At that point, the server can:

   a) return a 404;
   b) extract the image and return that;
   c) return bundle.zip with some header information telling the browser 
that it's not an image but that the "/bundle.zip" part of the URL 
matched something else and it should look inside it for the rest of the 
path.

Neither (a) nor (b) are very useful to us. (c) could be made to work, 
but it's not exactly elegant. The server would also have to know if the 
UA supports (c), and fall back to (b) if not, which means that some 
signalling needs to be made in the request. That's also not entirely 
nice (and it would have to happen on every request since the browser 
can't guess).

It gets particularly nasty when you have this:

   <img src='/bundle.zip/img/dahut.jpg'>
   <img src='/bundle.zip/img/unicorn.jpg'>
   <img src='/bundle.zip/img/chupacabra.jpg'>
   <img src='/bundle.zip/img/robin-at-the-beach.jpg'>

The chances are good that the browser would issue several of those 
requests before the first one returned with the information telling it 
to look in the bundle. That means it would return the bundle several 
times. Definitely a loss.

Or did I misunderstand what you had in mind?

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Friday, 10 May 2013 13:54:45 UTC