How much would a feature like image prefetching or packaging or ...
really add, relative to the overhead and complexity involved in
supporting it? One would get a marginal performance increase on
low-latency, high-bandwidth networks (which are rare -- in life, it
seems to be either high/high or low/low, excluding certain very rare
special cases) but not much else. Probably wouldn't even be
noticeable...
So I might suggest that design discussions take into account
practicality and usefulness in a system as complex as (e.g.) Mosaic
2.0 plus Plexus 3.0, and try to triage below a certain level, in
general.
Between HTTP/1.0, fill-out forms, and the other recent/coming
advancements on both client and server ends, we're nearing a really
powerful general-purpose information environment with considerable
extensibility; at this point we may want to focus on applications and
advanced functionality rather than "under the hood" types of things
like image packaging.
Just a thought,
Marc