- From: Bert Bos <bert@w3.org>
- Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2009 21:14:48 +0200
- To: www-style@w3.org
On Monday 31 August 2009, Boris Zbarsky wrote: > See > http://limi.net/articles/resource-packages for a very initial > proposal draft; comments welcome. Sort of a side-comment: one other piece of prior art is the DECLARE attribute of HTML, which allows you to list in the HEAD all the resources that might be useful to download right away. It lists the resources directly, instead of indirectly, as in the Limi proposal, which means it increases the size of the document more and thus has a higher risk of slowing down instead of speeding up the download of the full compound document. It exists since 1997, but my impression is that it isn't used. Maybe waiting for the BODY doesn't actually take that much longer? I also wonder if downloading a zip is really more efficient than downloading the individual files (assuming HTTP and a browser that supports pipelining and transfer-coding; it's not the same for FTP and other protocols). The stream of bytes that comes down to the client is about the same length as the zip (because the compression is the same). It contains more HTTP header lines, but the zip contains a directory. (On second thoughts, those header lines would somehow have to be added to the zip, too, because without them you don't know what the MIME type of each file is or how long you can cache it...) And, if preloading indeed proves efficient, shouldn't it be defined in a way that applies to all kinds of compound documents, not just HTML? Bert -- Bert Bos ( W 3 C ) http://www.w3.org/ http://www.w3.org/people/bos W3C/ERCIM bert@w3.org 2004 Rt des Lucioles / BP 93 +33 (0)4 92 38 76 92 06902 Sophia Antipolis Cedex, France
Received on Thursday, 3 September 2009 19:15:26 UTC