[whatwg] FYI: Mozilla's Resource Packages

[Anthony Bryan]

More info at http://limi.net/articles/resource-packages/ and
discussion at http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.platform/browse_thread/thread/31779262c6b05205
and a few responses on the HTTPbis list.


Making browsers faster: Resource Packages

A proposal to make downloading web page resources faster in all browsers.

Introduction & Rationale

What if there was a backwards compatible way to transfer all of the
resources that are used on every single page in your site — CSS, JS,
images, anything else — in a single HTTP request at the start of the
first visit to the page? This is what Resource Package support in
browsers will let you do.

Implementation

While Zip files do not have not the most elegant or efficient packing
format out there, they have the following very desirable traits:

   * Easily available reference implementations.
   * Can be unpacked even in partial state — which means that we can
stream the file, and put CSS and JavaScript first in the archive, and
they will unpacked and made available before the entire file has been
downloaded.
   * Excellent toolchain support, zip/unzip is available on all major
platforms, so it’s easy for web developers to use.

We propose this markup to signal a zipped resource package:

<link rel="resource-package"
     type="application/zip"
     href="site-resources.zip" />

-- 
(( Anthony Bryan ... Metalink [ http://www.metalinker.org ]
  )) Easier, More Reliable, Self Healing Downloads