[whatwg] More effective model for handling resources

[Qebui Nehebkau]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 6:57 AM, Tingan Ho <tingan87 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thought and feedback is welcomed

Surely it would be better to send an archive file containing the
resources the server expects the client to need, employing the Accept
header to decide whether to do so (ie, in order to request only the
lone file without whatever else the server feels should go along, the
client should exclude archives from the acceptable types), &c.?

I suppose it is possible that some intermediate caches may handle this
poorly, but, if so, that's fundamentally just bad design on the part
of those caches; I really think we just have to accept it and do the
sensible thing anyway.

(Ideally, by the way, we would bake cache expiration and any other
relevant response header metadata into the archive format. Of course,
this puts the onus on the browser to decide whether to send a separate
request for a particular resource in case it has changed, not on the
server to know and supply the new version - but I think this is a
better way to do things, personally.)