Re: [whatwg] resource hints and separating download from processing

On Mon, 11 Aug 2014, Ilya Grigorik wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 11, 2014 at 12:57 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> >
> > I hope to be able to post more concrete proposals soon, it's currently 
> > blocked on my understanding how I should be integrating HTML with ES6.
> 
> Any bugs or threads that I can follow to track progress? I'd love to 
> help if I can.

My understanding of ES6 is mostly being helped by discussions on #whatwg 
and e-mail threads to es-discuss.


> Two high-level cases:
> (a) optimizing load sequence of page that's currently being loaded
> (b) optimizing page load of a (potential) future navigation
> 
> For (a), we need to expose "preconnect" and "preload", such that the 
> developer and/or server (e.g. CDN accelerator) can tell the browser 
> which hosts it should connect to, which resources it should load (+ with 
> which priority, order), etc. Also, note that "preload" separates 
> download from processing, which is an important feature - e.g. fetch CSS 
> but don't evaluate it.

Preload is straight forward, sure. How much does preconnect within a page 
actually help? Isn't just declaring the URLs enough? I don't really see 
how you expect this to be used or exposed.


> For (b), we're talking about a speculative hint, hence we attach a 
> probability to the hint and let the UA decide if it has enough resources 
> / time / etc, to execute it, and how far it is willing to go with 
> response processing.

The ability to tell a page what subsequent resources will be necessary 
(prerendering) seems pretty straight-forward too, sure. That's mostly a 
solved problem with rel=prerender, no? Anything we add to make fetching 
more powerful will automatically be exposed to that too, presumably.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'

Received on Friday, 15 August 2014 16:27:28 UTC