I'm not quite sure I understand the difference between what you want to
do and what you don't, but...
A seperate HTTP request for each item is rather silly -- it'll cost you
two hundred bytes of headers for the request another hundred for the
reply and a connection. All this for a little checkbox, which probably
takes 20 bytes. Meaning that a twentieth of the actual bandwidth went
towards the data, while the rest was overhead. Hardly an efficient way
to do things.
Yes, it gets far better for bigger things, like 10K scripts, but most
of the requests will be for little things (especially if the scripts
are seperate files) like fields and checkboxes. And buttons with the
script "go next card" or whatnot.
If we do use HTTP, we'll need a much better way of doing it than each
item a seperate file, because that's just a waste of bandwidth. Not
only that, but having a card take 10 seconds to load -- even though it
only uses 5K of data -- is unacceptable. Just think of slow,
overloaded, far-away servers.
It would be much better if we were to make the background download at
once, up to say 50K. After that, large objects would be split off (such
as that nice 24bit color image). Same with cards. 50K downloads are
quite reasonable, even over a modem, and that really minimizes the
overhead.
The 50K chunks would need to be built by a 'export as HTTP streaming' feature.
Also, how are changes sent back? That is something that should be
looked into. Also, we should look into security (e.g., not allowing
someone to "accidentally" open the FC app file and write 0's to it or
send someone's data)
