- From: Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com>
- Date: Sun, 18 Oct 2009 14:38:12 -0500
On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 1:00 PM, Aryeh Gregor <Simetrical+w3c at gmail.com> wrote: > a) Avoiding flickering and jumping on page load. > b) Saving bandwidth. > c) Being able to preserve state of some parts of the page (e.g., > navigation collapse state) when others change (e.g., new content > loaded). I intend to solve a combination of (a) and (c) (b might be an ancillary benefit, however). Basically, there are two classes of websites who I think will benefit from this. 1. Fairly ordinary sites which have heavy widgetry in their skeleton. These might be js-based (good semantic scripting often involves sending something over the wire that's simple and accessible, then substantially transforming it with js on the client to something more useful/dynamic), flash-based, or something else entirely. The idea is that there are things which are expensive to initialize (in cpu, time, whatever) that are present on every page. 2. Relatively simple single-page apps. Something on the scale of gmail probably won't be able to use this, and that's fine; they're already making a significant js investment and can afford a bit more to handle their single-pageness themselves, plus html5 will add several features to make this easier. However, a simpler mail client may benefit significantly from this, as it eliminates a big chunk of necessary js. Other apps that have complex scripts that should maintain their state may benefit too. The idea here is similar in that there may be a significant blob of js state that is expensive to initialize or reload. Really simple sites with static sections that are *actually* static won't really see much benefit (the decrease in flickering may be useful, but it's such a minor benefit that it's not worth engineering towards). As well, very complex js-driven applications will have more complex requirements than can be met by this mechanism, and so won't benefit from it. But the middle ground I outlined above has significant ability to grow, and I think is currently being held back by the architecture of the web (where every page is a completely independent resource) and the difficulty/expense of routing around it with js. ~TJ
Received on Sunday, 18 October 2009 12:38:12 UTC