[whatwg] HTML resource packages

Wed Aug 4 03:08:40 PDT 2010

Justin Lebar:

> We at Mozilla are hoping to ship HTML resource packages in Firefox 4,
>    http://people.mozilla.org/~jlebar/respkg/
| <html packages='[pkg1.zip img1.png script.js styles/style.css]
|                [static/pkg2.zip]'>
> A page indicates in its <html> element that it uses one or more resource packages (…).

Why do you want to put this on the HTML level (exclusively), not the HTTP level?
As far as I undestand it, authors would usually put stylesheets, scripts and decorative images, but not HTML files into a resource package. These are usually common to several pages or the entire site or domain. Images might be referenced from within HTML or CSS files.

Why did you decide against <link rel="resource-package" href="pkg1.zip#files='img1.png,…'"/> or something like that? (The hash part is just guesswork.)

* Argument: What about incremental rendering? 
If there are, for instance, lots of (content) images in the resource file I will see them all at once as soon as the ZIP has been downloaded completely and decompressed, but with single files I would have seen them appear one after the other, which might have been enough.