Re: CSS: Extended tiling. Proposal

Bundling images *with the page* would be like PDF, but I don't think anyone proposed that.  I think 
what's desired is the ability to bundle all of a site's navigation and interface glyphs into one package.

This would be valuable largely because each HTTP request carries (uncompressed) headers in both 
directions, which are at least a few hundred bytes with all popular user agents and webservers, and 
are frequently close to the 4k cookie limit.  These headers often dwarf the image sizes for things 
like small navigation glyphs.

Does anyone happen to know if there's a way to do this with any current browsers?

David Woolley wrote:
>>support for packaging multiple images in a single file like Java does 
>>with .jar (read: zip compression) files could be an option which would 
> 
> 
> .jar files aren't actually compressed!  They use the .zip archive structure
> but in "store" mode, not in deflate mode.
> 
> 
>>keep things in one file, but would it be worth it?
> 
> 
> I think you have just invented PDF. Whoops!  Someone invented that before
> HTML (they used LZW then, but now use deflate, and it is more an SVG 
> analogue than an HTML one).
> 
> The reason that web pages tend to be more responsive than optimised,
> incrementally loaded, PDF files, over the internet, is primarily because
> the images (and fonts if used) are not embedded in the file and can
> therefore be cached and only fetched if actually needed.
> 
> Incidentally, HTTP 1.1 supports pipelining, so there there should not be
> many turn round delays, even if the uplink direction is busier than if the
> sender anticipated the set of images required.
>

Received on Wednesday, 5 May 2004 18:43:41 UTC