[whatwg] Gears design goals

[Robert O'Callahan]

On 6/30/07, Andy Palay <ajpalay at google.com> wrote:
>
> On Jun 26, 2007 4:26 PM, Robert O'Callahan <robert at ocallahan.org> wrote:
> > Sure they can. The user can only have one active login per browser
> session
> > anyway, so the app just swaps in a whole new set of resources when the
> user
> > logs in with a different ID. The only restriction is that when the
> user's
> > offline, they'll only be able to use the last ID that they logged in as.
>
>
> The problem with this is what happens when two users share the same
> machine.  Not unusual with families and laptops.
>
> So my kid and I both have an offline enabled version of a application X.
> My kid was the last one runing X before leaving on a trip. I open the laptop
> and fire up X. From what I believe you said, I can't see my version of X.
> This is a problem if the versions are actually different.


For this scenario people can use OS user switching or browser profiles ---
or, of course, the Web app can be modified to avoid giving multiple
resources the same URI.

(My eldest son is five years old and already I can see that letting him
share my browser session is a bad idea :-) )

One could (as Aaron did for Gearpad) down load all the code and dynamically
> use it depending on the user, but that can be expensive to do, especially as
> applications grow in size. For example in our initial tests it bacame clear
> that we would download different resources depending on the language setting
> for the user. You would not want to download all the languages for the
> application. If the user changed languages then we would recapture the
> application. Yes this does limit the user from changing languages when
> offline, but changing languages is a rare event and forcing the user to be
> online seemed to be a reasonable tradeoff.


I'm not quite sure what you're getting at, but let's suppose a Web app does
want to support multiple users sharing a single offline browser profile and
those users need different languages. (I think this is already a rather
narrow scenario, FWIW.) We'd ask the app author to give user-specific
resources user-specific URIs. For resources, such as help pages, that are
language specific but not user specific, we'd ask the author to give them
language-specific URIs (e.g. including /en/ or whatever). Each user's
manifest pulls in the appropriate resources, and precisely the required
language resources are downloaded.

Rob
-- 
"Two men owed money to a certain moneylender. One owed him five hundred
denarii, and the other fifty. Neither of them had the money to pay him back,
so he canceled the debts of both. Now which of them will love him more?"
Simon replied, "I suppose the one who had the bigger debt canceled." "You
have judged correctly," Jesus said. [Luke 7:41-43]
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