[whatwg] Zip archives as first-class citizens

[Simon Pieters]

On Fri, 13 Sep 2013 12:32:43 +0200, Robin Berjon <robin at w3.org> wrote:

> On 29/08/2013 15:58 , Simon Pieters wrote:
>> On Thu, 29 Aug 2013 15:02:48 +0200, Anne van Kesteren <annevk at annevk.nl>
>> wrote:
>>> On Thu, Aug 29, 2013 at 1:19 PM, Jake Archibald
>>> <jaffathecake at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> Causing a network error in existing browsers is a shame.
>>
>> It seems to fail to resolve in IE10. It works in
>> Gecko/WebKit/Blink/Presto: the %! is requested literally. However, both
>> Apache and IIS seems to return 400 Bad Request.
>
> That's not exactly promising.
>
>>> Picking something that could occur in paths seems problematic.
>>
>> I'm not sure why it's more problematic than something than could occur
>> in the fragment.
>>
>> For instance, the string "$zip=" is not present at all in
>> http://webdevdata.org/ data set 18/06/2013. So maybe we could use a
>> string like that in the path and have a graceful fallback path in legacy
>> browsers that work in existing servers.
>
> That's my preferred approach so far. However I wonder about the precise  
> details.
>
> Assuming <img src="/foo.zip/$zip=dahut.png"> I'm guessing that the  
> browser would actually just request "/foo.zip" from the server in the  
> same manner that fragments are stripped, right?

"/foo.zip/", but yeah.

> Somehow the stripping bothers me a bit; for instance, what would  
> Navigation Controller see?

I'm not familiar with that.

> I wonder if we couldn't just use the query part for this: <img  
> src="/foo.zip?!zip/dahut.png">. No stripping is needed (as far as I know  
> servers would normally just serve foo.zip in this case), which  
> simplifies the model.

The query is sent to the server. What the server does with it depends on  
the server. Making different requests for /foo.zip?!zip/dahut.png and  
/foo.zip?!zip/lol.png is bad because we want the same response for UAs  
that support the feature, but caches wouldn't know that they're the same  
when they have different queries.

-- 
Simon Pieters
Opera Software