<div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jul 22, 2009 at 10:02 AM, Drew Wilson <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:atwilson@google.com">atwilson@google.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;">
<div><div><div class="gmail_quote"><div><div>I think this boils down to "the Gears 'requiredCookie' attribute was really useful".</div><div></div></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>
Pretty much, yeah.</div><div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><div><div><div class="gmail_quote"><div>Yeah, I think that's the use case they are trying to support - offline access to web apps where any one of multiple users can log in. I have to say that I'm somewhat fuzzy on the precise use case, though.</div>
<div></div></div></div></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Imagine two users of <a href="http://fancyapp.com">fancyapp.com</a>, with their own logins and data and custom skins and whatnot. The contents of the main page are uncacheable and are totally different depending on the cookies in the request, which tell the server who is logged in. This is the way nearly every web app works today, and this is also the way a lot of people share a single computer.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Without any offline support, they can share one browser, if one logs out of fancyapp, and the other logs in.</div><div><br></div><div>If fancyapp supports offline use with Gears, then one of the users can install an offline client, without affecting the other user, because of requiredCookie.</div>
<div><br></div><div>But if fancyapp supports offline use with HTML5's app cache, then if one user installs an offline client, fancyapp will keep working for that user, but not for the other user, who will have to go get their own computer, browser, profile, or whatever they need to avoid hitting the other user's app cache.</div>
<div><br></div><div>The engineers at fancyapp could rewrite their mail page so it's just a little router that looks at cookies and makes subsequent requests to user-specific URLs to really load the app. But that's an inferior user experience, because it introduces an extra round trip to get the initial page properly rendered. So they'll probably have to support both.</div>
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