HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
Offline
Remy Sharp
How MANY TIMES
have I been working on a train,
desperately trying to get a 3G connection with my cheap
dongle, and failed to navigate a web application because
we went into a tunnel (and thus lost all connectivity)? A lot,
that's how many. Computing with no Internet or with a
choppy connection has always been common with mobile
computing, but now you are more likely to be trying to
work in a hosted application. Sometimes, you may sim-
ply chose to go offline, what then? As we become more
mobile with our computers, being able to use a website
outside of reception becomes more and more important.
We're used to creating web apps that rely absolutely
on the Web. Our websites run in browsers, which are
designed to be a viewport onto the Web. The offline web
applications part of the HTML5 spec takes the “web” out
of “web app.” The browser will manage a local cache so
our application will work without an Internet connection.
