[Sugar-devel] directly browsing compressed content in the datastore

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

S Page wrote:
> I sent "Viewing compressed content using jar: protocol in Browse !" a
> while back, no one cared :-)  To repeat, the XULRunner engine can
> directly browse files in JAR and ZIP archives using Sun's jar:
> protocol.
> Regardless, I've been playing with it some more in 8.2.1.

Cool.

I think jar: has a lot of potential, and we should definitely be thinking
about how to get it working.  Lucian experimented with jar: for browsing
offline webpages, but ultimately rejected it after determining that
webpages using javascript would not function properly.  Instead, his
modified browse just decompresses the archive and uses file://.  This
works, but loses the significant efficiency advantages of jar:.

Possible avenues to rectify this:
1. Make javascript work from JARs.  I don't understand the exact problem,
so I cannot say precisely what is needed.
2. Identify bundles that don't require javascript.  For example, we could
declare that objects with a Mozilla MAFF mimetype (application/x-maff)
will be fully decompressed, but all other zipfiles will be processed via
jar:.  A metadata key could also be used.
3. Implement a runtime heuristic for whether javascript is needed. For
examples, zipfiles containing no HTML can safely be loaded via jar:.

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