What’s Next for ASP.NET Web Optimization

What’s Next for ASP.NET Web Optimization:
Now that Visual Studio 2012 is done, we’re busy figuring out what we should do next.  For Web optimization, there are a few key scenarios that we know we want to support moving forward:

• Design and build-time optimization and generation of static, versioned files that can be deployed to the server/cdn/etc.


• Virtual path provider support (this is to-date, the most requested addition)


• Richer CDN fallback

There are also a whole bunch of other scenarios that we’ve either heard from different people or come up with during brainstorming.  For example:

• Inline script optimization


• Work more easily with client side script loaders


• Optimize HTML


• Resolve relative paths that change when a resource is bundled (e.g. css that references an image using a relative path)


• And many more…

So with the future in mind I have 2 questions for you.  The first is a general, “what are you looking for?”  Do some of the items listed above resonate with you?  Is there something you want to make sure we’re considering?
The second question deals with a change in design philosophy for the optimization framework.  When we first designed the framework, it was an explicit goal to limit the scope of modifications that we performed on your scripts and styles (limited, because minifying is obviously an operation that modifies your content).  This is because the greater the delta that exists between the code you wrote and the code that gets pushed to the browser, the greater the difficulty in debugging.
However, several of the scenarios that we’re considering for future versions will require us to move further away from this initial goal.  For example, to correctly resolve relative paths to images from within bundled CSS, we will need to modify the image URL.  Optimizing inline scripts and/or HTML will require modifying the page content itself.  These are just a few of many different examples of where developer content modification will be necessary.
So my second question is – is original content modification/rewriting an issue for you?  Or is it one of those concerns that we’ve been carrying simply because it’s a concern we’ve been carrying?

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