Subject: [Wpack] Broadening the WPACK WG charter

From: Daniel Ehrenberg <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 01 Dec 2020 16:23:56 +0100

Hi WPACK WG,

I'm very excited by the Web Bundle format being developed in this WG, to
represent a bundle of HTTP responses. It has the potential to meet a lot
of different needs! Some use cases I'm especially interested in are:
- Subresource loading (related to what's described in
https://github.com/WICG/webpackage/blob/master/explainers/subresource-loading.md
, potentially with subsetting as in
https://docs.google.com/document/d/11t4Ix2bvF1_ZCV9HKfafGfWu82zbOD7aUhZ_FyDAgmA/edit#
)
- A format to use within JavaScript/Web tooling across a build pipeline,
to represent the whole static part of an application
- A way to configure web servers to serve a static directory with the
appropriate HTTP headers as well as for serving dynamic subsets of
bundles

I wrote a gist with my rough thoughts pulling together various aspects
of Web Bundle applications at
https://gist.github.com/littledan/e01801001c277b0be03b1ca54788505e .
I've been discussing it with different web platform and tooling
stakeholders, and finding broadly shared interest in meeting these goals
with a format like Web Bundles.

However, I'm not quite sure how to interpret this group's charter. The
charter's streaming and random access design goals are definitely
important for the use cases I mentioned. However, I don't know if my
goals are in alignment with those of this group: subresource loading is
explicitly identified as nice-to-have, and build tooling and serving are
not identified. It is great to consider concrete use cases to evaluate
and refine the design, but fortunately, in this case, it seems like
there is little contradiction among the needs of different applications.
The architecture of bundle sections is nicely extensible and can be
applied to meet different purposes. So I'm not sure if it's necessary to
make a hierarchy placing some use cases above others.

How would people feel about generalizing the charter to focus less on
*why* the WPACK WG wants to define a Web Bundle, and instead broaden to
*what* the group is trying to define (a general-purpose, extensible file
format for a bundle of HTTP responses which meets certain properties)?
This way, we can bring people into the coalition who might have
different motivations for representing this information, and develop a
more widely adopted standard to solve this common, reoccurring problem.

Thanks,
Dan

---

From: "Martin Thomson" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 07 Dec 2020 20:16:19 +1100

The idea that one resource can speak for another resource remains something I'm concerned about.  This is a property of several of these proposals and - as far as I can tell - not well motivated by use cases.  I realize that you have narrowly scoped the replacement model, but I don't think that is sufficient.  Until now, the notion of relative references and paths have only had limited use in the web security model.  (I still hold the view that the prefix in SW is a mistake, but that is a weaker notion than the one you propose.)

I think that it would be better to have complete encapsulation.  That is, resources in a bundle have identity only within the context of that bundle.

As for your question about chartered scope, I see no fundamental reason that your design and ideas can't be discussed here in terms of format, resource identification, security, and those things that are already in chartered scope.  

The details of the specific proposals are a little too wordy for me to distill though.  It seems like a lot of what you are trying to tackle is directly part of how browsers work, which is not in scope here.

On Wed, Dec 2, 2020, at 02:23, Daniel Ehrenberg wrote:
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