[whatwg] Cross-domain databases; was: "File package protocol and manifest support?"
Brett Zamir
brettz9 at yahoo.com
Tue May 19 17:26:10 PDT 2009
I would like to suggest an incremental though I believe significant
enhancement to Offline applications/SQLite.
That is, the ability to share a complete database among offline
applications according to the URL from which it was made available. It
could be designated by the origin site as a read-only database, or also
potentially with shared write access, shareable with specific domains or
all domains, and perhaps also with a mechanism to indicate the license
of its contents. Perhaps the manifest file could include such
information. Actually, there might even be a shared space for databases
directly downloaded by the user (or by an application) which would allow
all applications access, no doubt requiring UA permission.
Ideally the origin site could also have control over providing an update
to the database (not necessarily through manually performing UPDATE
commands, but potentially by simply providing a new database at the
previous location which was checked periodically for a new modification
date). I don't know whether it would ideal to tie this in to the caching
API (perhaps deleting the database reference could also cause it to be
re-downloaded and also force the database to be re-created). Perhaps the
cache API could also be optionally shared with other domains as well,
allowing them to ensure their application was working with the latest data.
I believe custom protocols will also play into this well, as there could
be a number of uses for operating on the same data set while linking to
it in a way which is application-independent.
(Thanks to Kristof Zelechovski for helping me distill the essence of the
idea a bit more succinctly and more in line with HTML 5's progress to date.)
Brett
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