[whatwg] Offline Web Apps

[Oliver Hunt]

On 24/09/2007, at 10:45 PM, Robert O'Callahan wrote:
<snip>
>
> For small files, synchronous reading is OK. Perhaps there should be  
> a separate whiz-bang asynchronous API ... it could support partial  
> reads too.

I would be concerned about this -- for many people async APIs seem  
scary compared to synchronous ones, and people will end up doing  
silly things (excessive reads, etc) using a synchronous API, eg.  
synchronous api for large reads, or many sequential small synchronous  
reads -- either of which will block the main thread in excitingly bad  
ways.

I would make the argument that anyone making a real webapp (online or  
offline) is likely to have at least *some* experience with async-xhr,  
so should have to much difficulty with an async api for reading/writing.

>
>
> Also, I'm not sure how a web app can be expected to know the encoding
> of a text file on disk.
>
> The same way that any other app does --- guess based on the  
> extension and expected usage? --- now that we've all standardized  
> on meta-data-less file systems :-(. I suppose an app could examine  
> the first chunk of the file and then re-read the file with a better  
> guess.

The MacOS fs appears to store encoding, but then maybe editors are  
more careful about including the BOM, etc in files that they save.

Surely it would be possible for the browser to transparently store  
the encoding in the event that none was defined by the developer?

> Rob
--Oliver