Roan and Trevor are doing great work on the resource loader to
combine/concatenate resources served from bits in as few, and as small requests
as possible. To do this, they introduce an intermediate step however, the
request of a "manifest" which determines which versions of styles/js to load.
Unfortunately this introduces an extra round trip before the resources can be
loaded, which wouldn't be there if the manifest could be part of the html
(article) page.
With the current caching system we cannot really do that since it would cause
all cache misses, however both Squid and Varnish support ESI:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_Side_Includes
In this way we could just set a very low ttl on the manifest part of the
article page, and dynamically combine the page at the Squid or Varnish level.