[whatwg] Appcache feedback (various threads)

[Adam de Boor]

On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 3:28 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:

> On Fri, 13 Aug 2010, Patrick Mueller wrote:
> > On 8/12/10 6:29 PM, Ian Hickson wrote:
> > > On Wed, 19 May 2010, Patrick Mueller wrote:
> > > >
> > > > I've been playing with application cache for a while now, and found
> > > > the diagnostic information available to be sorely lacking.
> > > >
> > > > For example, to diagnose user-land errors that occur when using
> > > > appcache, this is the only practical tool I have at my disposal:
> > > >
> > > >     tail -f /var/log/apache2/access_log /var/log/apache2/error_log
> > > >
> > > > I'd like to be able to get the following information:
> > > >
> > > > - during "progress" events, as identified in step 17 of the
> > > > application cache download process steps in 6.6.4 "Downloading or
> > > > updating an application cache"), I'd like to have the URL of the
> > > > resource that is about to be downloaded.  The "progress" event from
> > > > step 18 ( indicating all resources have been downloaded) doesn't
> > > > need this.
> > >
> > > What do you need this for?
> >
> > See the first sentence: diagnostic information.
>
> Surely if you want to debug the appcache update mechanism it'd be easier
> just to have the browser provide you with a dedicated debugging tool for
> it than for the browser to provide you with more information in an event.
>
>
> > As an example, an application might collect a log of errors and post
> > them back to a server for diagnostic purposes later.  Not possible if
> > the only way to get app-cache diagnostics is with a "web debugger".
>
> That rather depends on the debugger.
>

The one concern I'd add to this mix is cache installation in the presence of
funny network environments, specifically misbehaving proxies, or browser
extensions / plugins. As an app developer, it's always helpful to have as
many tools as possible to debug problems that happen in the wild. For a
supposedly-standardized environment like the web, it's amazing to me how
many there are... It's feasible to have a small set of users click something
to create a log file they can email you, but asking them to fire up the
debugger in their browser? No.

a