

Steve Souders: Fewer HTTP requests through resource packages - lucumo
http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2009/11/18/fewer-requests-through-resource-packages/

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prodigal_erik
I'm glad the comments there brought up content negotiation, where I see more
underused potential as new features and plugins are developed. It also seems
odd for a browser to give up control over which order resources are loaded in,
in the name of performance. Haven't browser authors done a lot of work to
first fetch resources _they_ consider critical, make a usable partial
rendering, and then fetch the rest?

Before people use this, I would hope they write some code to make their
servers package the live resources on the fly. If an author has to do the
packaging without a build toolchain (most people don't even use RPMs to get
content onto production servers), they are likely to include resources some
browsers wouldn't have fetched (or that many pages don't reference at all) and
let it get out of date.

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est
While this idea is nice, I have a meta-idea:

Since HTML5 introduce WebSocket, why don't we provide a plugin mechanism in
browsers that allows downloadable site defined Internet protocols? In fact
non-HTTP protocols been around in browsers since stone age, IE, Netscape and
Firefox support Gopher in some degree. Chrome silently added libjingle for
Bookmark Sync, it's even yields "P2P error" when something goes wrong. Opera
has a BitTorrent built in.

Browser is container + Internet IO, period.

This idea should start within hacker & developer community first. I hope
browsers could innovate as prosper as WinAmp developer ecosphere used to be.
Not just a crappy HTTP requester+fancy HTML renderer with round corners, ogg-
only audio, shinny canvas and 3D shit.

