Packaged HTTP: Reconsidering Web Efficiency

The steadily increasing beautification of the Web causes some unique issues. Web pages following contemporary visual design patterns require several tens of resources in order to be rendered. This poses challenges in terms of data transfer costs and (user-perceived) latency in particular. This paper proposes an approach to address this issue by reducing the amount of required requests per page as a complement and enhancement to existing HTTP caching mechanisms. The basic idea is to bundle all the referenced resources inside a hypertext document residing on the origin server and to send the complete bundle to the requesting user agent. Thus, the number of requests required to fill or refresh the client’s cache is minimized to exactly one request/response pair. This increases the total amount of data to be sent in some cases, but reduces the amount of requests to be generated, send and processed significantly in cache filling or refreshing contexts. This reduction of processing costs at the server side results in lower energy costs which may out-weight, as the case may be, the additional transfer costs.