Comments on: “Work Offline”: What’s the point?

By: Ian Bicking

Ian Bicking — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 21:56:14 +0000

I suspect OLPC (http://laptop.org) is going to have to think about this as well, as offline use is going to be more prominent there. It’s possible it will take the form of an HTTP proxy instead of a Firefox extension.

My guess for Scribe is that it’s doing something to fill the cache (by pre-requesting pages), then using XMLHttpRequest to get the pages and handle failed requests gracefully.

However, I have no idea how it keeps pending data, except perhaps as cookies. The 4k of input you can put in cookies is enough to queue quite a bit of information, but it still feels fairly limited. That’s the only place I can think of. If they did use that, you’d basically queue stuff from Javascript by setting the cookie, then on your first online request the server app would see the queued information and process it immediately.

By: Bob Hunter

Bob Hunter — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 08:42:24 +0000

On the specific topic of FireFox’s cache, I find myself saving pages (File->Save Page As) only to drop them into a messy, unorganized folder. More recently, I discovered the add-on “ScrapBook”, which solved the problem next to perfection. Articles are saved properly (they look exactly like the original, unlike FF’s save-as feature) in a organized and customizable folder. There are two problems with it:

1. to save into the cache, you need to trigger the action either via the mouse or an unnatural combination of keys; I would love to customize FF’s alt-s macro to do this;

2. when reading a page, FF+SB does not check whether you already have that page locally, compare the timestamp, and display the local one instead of the remote one.

Bob

By: Chris Cunningham

Chris Cunningham — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 17:56:07 +0000

Work Offline is a throwback to Netscape 4, where it actually worked. In a world where the code in question was maintained at all (it isn’t) Firefox would do the same as IE does.

– Chris