For years there's been a funny situation related to software and media consumption. Companies usually pay for the software they use. Many home users use the same software for free, downloading cracked versions. Users can't always afford to pay $700 for using a program like Photoshop. Doesn't sound fair, either, to pay such a high price just for doing some editing of family photos once in a while. Computer games are expensive too. Many users play, but only a part of them pay. If all gamers paid, the price might be lower. And then people do different things like going to the movie theater, buying DVDs, downloading movies from the net, or watching them on some website with streaming technology. The last two do not bring any money back to the producers, except if it's a good movie and has a promotional effect.

For many years I had in my mind a way of getting developers and artists paid. It's quite simple: your computer would track what you spend time on. It could be anything like using applications, watching online movies or listening to online music. You would pay a reasonable fixed amount of money every month. This amount would then be shared among the people who created the applications you used and those who produced the movies you watched and the songs you heard. With such a system in effect, people would have access to all software, movies and songs. Everything legal, and with good quality. This would also benefit those who create a one time successful YouTube video. It would allow new artists to get paid. If you would listen more times this new unknown artist than that famous world known band, then the new artist would get more money from you. I think this would motivate people to create more. Anybody who creates something used by many could get paid for it.

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In mid 90s I realized most Flash swf files could be compressed using zip. The resulting file would often be 50% smaller. I sent this suggestion to Macromedia, and I was very happy when the next version of the SWF file format came out, it included LZW compression.

Google has an initiative to make the web faster. They just proposed a new lossy image file format. I was just wondering if something like what SWF does could be also used for HTML. Imagine you pack all your JavaScript, CSS and smaller images inside a resource.zip file. Later, you would target each file inside this zip file like:

<link rel='stylesheet' href='resource.zip?file=/mystyle.css' type='text/css' />
<script type='text/javascript' src='resource.zip?file=/jquery.js'></script>
<img src="resource.zip?file=/images/blank.gif" />

This way the browser could download all the resources with just one request. Compare this to many complex sites that make over one hundred requests to the server. CSS sprites would be something from the past.

There are some drawbacks: linking to compressed resources in other domains wouldn't be as easy as today, and crawling by search engines would require decompressing the file first. Uploading asset groups by FTP would also be faster, but then updating a single file would require uploading the complete compressed asset file.

In any case the speed increase would probably be very noticeable if web sites downloaded most of their assets on one request, instead of making hundreds of them.