[whatwg] Zip archives as first-class citizens

Anne van Kesteren annevk at annevk.nl
Thu Aug 29 04:13:27 PDT 2013


On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 2:14 AM, Mark Nottingham <mnot at mnot.net> wrote:
> I'm sure you've thought about this more than I have, but can you humour me and dig in a bit here?

Thanks Mark, I had not fully explored this one yet!


> If I wanted to link *within* the HTML, it could still be <a href="#test">, correct?

That would be ideal, yes.


> Couldn't that be done by saying that for URIs inside a ZIP file, the base URI is effectively an authority-less scheme?
>
> E.g., for "foo.html" the base uri would be "zip://foo.html".

Having thought about this some I think this would require pretty
invasive model changes, probably prohibitively so.

* Resources that can contain subresources (HTML, CSS, JavaScript,
workers, ...) would need to have an outer and inner location. If you
have e.g. <a href="#test"> updating the address bar to
#path=test.html&id=test is somewhat magic. For <a href="other.html">
it'd be pretty magic too.
*  For origin comparison you'd have to look at the outer location.

Either a sub-scheme or zip-path is a lot simpler as the changes are
limited to URL and Fetch rather than most end points, URL, and Fetch.


> I *think* the end effect here would be that from the inside, HTML, CSS and JS wouldn't have to be changed to be zipped.

Given the above I think that's not true. Unless you mean resources,
not specifications, in which case that could probably be correct.


> From the outside, if you want to link *into* a zip file, you have to be aware of its structure, but that's really always going to be the case, isn't it?

Yes, that's correct.


-- 
http://annevankesteren.nl/



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