[whatwg] Comments/questions on 4.6 Offline Web applications

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 12 Oct 2007, Adam Roben wrote:
> > 
> > (Now step 20.) It does. Which is to say, it being on the online 
> > whitelist has no effect. Should it have an effect? We can omit the 
> > caching of such files if you want.
> 
> Given that section 4.6.5.1 says that resources in the online whitelist 
> are always fetched from the network, it seems that caching any resource 
> that is in the online whitelist is simply a waste of time and space. I 
> guess there's no need to explicitly state that such resources should not 
> be cached -- implementors could design their implementation that way as 
> an optimization.

Actually, I just realised that there is one time where the resource might 
get used: when it's opened from a top-level browsing context. The 
top-level browsing context loads don't check the online whitelist, they 
just look for a cache with that resource, and load the file directly from 
that cache, without going through the online whitelist check.

So there's not really an optimisation that can be done.


On Fri, 12 Oct 2007, Darin Adler wrote:
> 
> Our experience with HTML has taught us that authors don't necessarily 
> read the specifications nor conform. The behavior of web browsers when 
> application authors ignore conformance requirements may be quite 
> important to compatibility in practice; if it's not specified then the 
> applications end up relying on the behavior of the implementation they 
> test with.
> 
> So I think it's worth considering being explicit about the error 
> handling. Not necessarily "for the authors", but for the benefit of the 
> web browser implementers.

I basically pioneered the concept of defining error handling in Web specs. 
Don't worry, the spec has error handling defined. :-P

There are two sections for the cache manifest; one is for authors and 
conformance checkers, and the other is for Web browser implementors.

Cheers,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'