I'm a French software engineer, living in the city of Rennes. I'm the founder of SEO4Ajax (seo4ajax.com), and I'm the author of SingleFile and zip.js (github.com/gildas-lormeau).
I have an example of a side-project [1] where I think I naturally applied the best practices described in this article. My goal was to see if it's possible to code an entire project using a single agent (Claude).
To do this, I "simply" asked the agent, every time it encountered an issue, how to resolve it, using a validation tool or script. I also asked it to code these tools during audits. As a result, I now have over 30+ rules [2] for validating their commits. It's working pretty well now.
I just ran a test on a 10GB HTML page and called window.stop() via a 100ms setTimeout, which, in my opinion, simulates what would happen in a better-implemented case in SingleFile if the call to window.stop() were made as soon as the HTTP headers of the fetch request are received (i.e. easy fix). And it actually works. It interrupts the loading at approx. 15MB of data, the rendering of the page, and it's partially and smoothly displayed (no freeze). So it's not totally useless but it deserves to be optimized at a minimum in SingleFile, as I indicated. In the end, the MDN documentation is not very clear...
Edit #2: I've just understood that "parent" in "this method cannot interrupt its *parent* document's loading" from the MDN doc probably means the "parent" of the frame (when the script is running into it).
The call to window.stop() stops HTML parsing/rendering, which is unnecessary since the script has downloaded the page via HTTP and will decompress it as-is as a binary file (zip.js supports concatenated payloads before and after the zip data). However, in my case, the call to window.stop() is executed asynchronously once the binary has been downloaded, and therefore may be too late. This is probably less effective than in your case with gtwar.
I implemented this in the simplest way possible because if the zip file is read from the filesystem, window.stop() must not be called immediately because the file must be parsed entirely. In my case, it would require slightly more complex logic to call window.stop() as early as possible.
Edit: Maybe it's totally useless though, as documented here [1]: "Because of how scripts are executed, this method cannot interrupt its parent document's loading, but it will stop its images, new windows, and other still-loading objects." (you mentioned it in the article)
Edit #2: Since I didn't know that window.call() was most likely useless in my case, I understand your approach much better now. Thank you very much for clarifying that with your question!
The reason I did not implement the innovative mechanism you describe is because, in my case, all the technical effort was/is focused on reading the archive from the filesystem. No one has suggested it either.
I haven't looked closely, but I get the impression that this is an implementation detail which is not really related to the format. In this case, a polyglot zip/html file could also interrupt page loading via a window.stop() call and rely on range requests (zip.js supports them) to unzip and display the page. This could also be transparent for the user, depending on whether the file is served via HTTP or not. However, I admit that I haven't implemented this mechanism yet.
I would like to know why ZIP/HTML polyglot format produced by SingleFile [1] and mentioned in the article "achieve static, single, but not efficiency". What's not efficient compared to the gwtar format?
If we were to compare this to the JS world, it seems Python’s async is closer to Babel-style generator-based coroutines [1] than to JavaScript’s async/await execution model.
Great idea, some people have already implemented it for the same type of need, it would seem (see the list of user agents in the source code). Implementation seems simple.
FYI, zip.js has no issues with 1 (it can be fixed with standard extra fields), 3 (zip64 support), and 5 (you cannot have more than 64K of comment data at the end of the file).
Unfortunately, I will have difficulty answering your question because my knowledge is limited to the zip format. In the use case presented in the article, I find that the zip format meets the need well. Generally speaking, in the context of long-term archiving, its big advantage is also that there are thousands of implementations for reading/writing zip files.
For implementation in a library, you can use HttpRangeReader [1][2] in zip.js [3] (disclaimer: I am the author). It's a solid feature that has been in the library for about 10 years.
