[whatwg] HTML resource packages

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Aug 3, 2010, at 5:31 PM, Justin Lebar wrote:

> We at Mozilla are hoping to ship HTML resource packages in Firefox 4,
> and we wanted to get the WhatWG's feedback on the feature.
> 
> For the impatient, the spec is here:
> 
>    http://people.mozilla.org/~jlebar/respkg/
> 
> and the bug (complete with builds you can try and some preliminary
> performance numbers) is here:
> 
>    https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=529208

Have you done any performance testing of this feature, and if so can you share any of that data?

I'm particularly interested in:

* Effect of using a resource package on page-load time, in the initial fully uncached case.
* Effect of using a resource package on page-load time, in the case where the resources in the package have expired but not have changed.
* Effect of using a resource package on page-load time, in the case where the resources in the package have expired and a subset of them have changed. (This could still be a win for packages.)
* Effect of using a resource package on page-load time, in the case where everything in the package is cached.

These are probably most interesting under high-latency network conditions (real or simulated). You address these points qualitatively in your comments but I'd love to see some numbers. That would make it easier to evaluate the performance tradeoffs.


Separately, I am curious to hear how http headers are handled; it's a TODO in the spec, and what the TODO says seems poor for the Content-Type header in particular. It would make it hard to use package resources in any context that looks at the MIME type rather than always sniffing. Any thoughts on this?


In general I am in favor of features that can improve page load times and which are 


Cheers,
Maciej