The chrome team had an interesting thread on this topic not long ago. Unfortunately it wasn't on the public chromium-dev mailing list, so I can't provide a link to it here :(
<summary (according to me at least:)> The gist of it was that providing appcaching for general use w/o any special privileges is a good thing, but not all usages of this feature are qualitatively the same thing. In some cases it's purely about performance enhancement or reduced network utilization (traditional caching goals). In other cases it's about providing additional guarantees around application availability. Its fair to evict data cached for the former cases as needed, but not ok to evict data cached for the latter cases. There is no means for the system to distinguish between these two cases. There is no API to indicate which use is which. In the latter case (gauranteed app availability), there is more involved than the appcache... there are also databases, localstorage values to which the gaurantee extends to. What's missing is a way for "applications" to declare themselves as such and to establish privileges to keep data around forever. Given that, the system could relate persistent resource with "applications", and based on their privileges, evict or not when space becomes an issue. A handwavvy syntax for declaring an "application"... <html application='someurl'>... the url uniquely identifies the app, the resource loaded from that url contains a user friendly description and set of desired privileges... all pages that refer to that application url are considered part of that app... all resource created on behalf of that app are tracked by the system as such. Food for thought. _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-dev
