On 13-07-09 5:25 PM, Nicolas B. Pierron wrote:
I agree, and where I think packaged app (zip of all used files) are
good for the size of the initial download (even if they are way
smaller than Android ones) but I do not think this is good for
updates. Suppose, I have a web site with 10 pages. I want to add an
extra page. I will probably modify one existing page and add the new
page into the zip file. Why should we re-download all resources,
instead of the 2 modified files?
This is a good point, so maybe a self-contained zip file is a bad idea.
The key requirement is that the OS have a way to determine what
resources it needs to pre-fetch to enable a notion of local context so
that the "app install" can be separated from "app use" - and so users
can do heavyweight downloads for installs when they're on cheaper
networks like wifi).
I suppose to that end, the existing offline cache.manifest seems "almost
there". It can be expanded to include app metadata, along with update
metadata.
Packaged apps have the advantages of providing a way to do one network
access to see if a new version is available where app-cache will do
one access for each page, and might even get an inconsistent update.
To solve that we can only check the manifest file for updates, and
assume that the manifest file (if present) ensure that other resources
present in the app-cache are still valid.
An expanded offline offline manifest file spec can easily include
provision for specifying version numbers for the identified resources.
In that case, checking for updates would still be one network access
(get a new manifest file, compare version numbers of resources within),
but actual updating might require multiple accesses to update each
individual file.
Kannan
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