Packaging Websites

Not to be confused with webpack, this repository holds a collection of specifications aimed at packaging websites. These specifications replace the W3C TAG's Web Packaging Draft and will allow people to bundle together the resources that make up a website, so they can be shared offline, either with or without a proof that they came from the original website. A full list of use cases and resulting requirements is available in draft-yasskin-webpackage-use-cases (Editor's draft). The explainer walks through how to use these specs for to achieve the use cases.

The specifications come in a couple layers:

1. Signed HTTP exchanges (Editor's draft): These allow a browser to trust that a single HTTP request/response pair was generated by the origin it claims.
2. Bundled HTTP exchanges: A collection of exchanges, each of which could be signed or unsigned, with some metadata describing how to interpret the bundle as a whole. This specification has an initial draft in a PR, but isn't finished yet. This work may proceed through either the IETF or the W3C/WHATWG.
3. Loading: A description of how browsers load signed and bundled exchanges. This will be initially specified in the WICG and then will merge into the appropriate specs, e.g. Fetch, that live in either the W3C or WHATWG.

A previous draft of the format combined layers 1 and 2 into a single format for signed packages: draft-yasskin-dispatch-web-packaging (Editor's draft). The DISPATCH WG at IETF99 recommended the current split.

Building this repository

Building the Draft

Formatted text and HTML versions of the draft can be built using make.

$ make

This requires that you have software installed as described in https://github.com/martinthomson/i-d-template/blob/master/doc/SETUP.md.

Packaging tool.

Install this with go install github.com/WICG/webpackage/go/signed-exchange/cmd/gen-signedexchange. This tool is not yet documented well.