Pipelining is not enough even if the internet infrastructure was perfect. Why?
1. Slow requests stall the entire pipeline.
2. The initial request stalls the pipeline.
3. The pipeline is being pulled instead of pushed so your performance is still roundtrip-lag-bound if you have cascading references. For example an HTML file references a .css file which references PNG costs 3 round trips at least.
True, if latency dominates that much in your situation, which can happen with no congested pipes in the path. An HTML5 "manifest" with pipelining would take care of all but the initial and 2nd latency.
1. Slow requests stall the entire pipeline. 2. The initial request stalls the pipeline. 3. The pipeline is being pulled instead of pushed so your performance is still roundtrip-lag-bound if you have cascading references. For example an HTML file references a .css file which references PNG costs 3 round trips at least.