[whatwg] Offline Web Apps

[Aaron Boodman]

On Sep 13, 2007 3:59 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> We're talking about Bugzilla here. There's a LOT of data to send per bug.
> All the metadata, all the comments, the entire changelog, it adds up to
> probably not much less than the actual page as generated by the server.

In order to offline-enable bugzilla, you would first need to turn it
into an ajax-style application. Where you separate the UI template
from the data.

If you still want to keep the old URLs working, this basically means
capturing (and periodically updating) every single possible entry
point, even though they will all have the exact same content (the ui
template). This doesn't seem reasonable to me.

> I think the problem here isn't necessarily just the query parameters
> though. The problem is more that the application has an open-ended URI
> space, and we want to capture the whole thing, without actually
> downloading a near-infinite amount of data per user.
>
> Another example would be flickr, where there are bazillions of images,
> each with their own permalink. Those, though, aren't query parameters.

That's true, this was a compromise for Gears. Perhaps what's needed is
the concept of aliases. The developer could specify every possible
address that could be used to access this application.

This would be more flexible than the current Gears solution, and I
could see it being used for other things as well.

I still would think you would want some sort of simple pattern
matching so you don't have to list every single bug separately, but it
would also work for the flickr case you describe.

- a