Re: Version identifier

Agree that this has value - though there are a few possible complexities:

 - If this is intended to replace the use of a comment for the version number to trigger an upgrade, then we should be careful not to leave use cases where the comment will still be used even though this new feature is available (eg by adding constraints to the version which the comment doesn't have)
 - In some apps, the identifier string in the manifest is user specific (I think Jake does that..?) so I'd be wary of formalising the terminology using the word 'version', since it may in practice serve other uses.  Possibly ID would be more appropriate.
 - Are there any use cases that would see this feature being misused?  This would be the only JS API into the actual content of the App Cache, so I can see people setting something like 'version {VERY_LONG_STRING_OF_JSON}' and using it as a data store.  No idea whether there would ever be any compelling reason to do that, but if it's the only way in, there's a risk that someone may find a reason to use it that way.

However, on the whole, I think we have far larger fish to fry here.  In practice, this is a solved problem, because if I really want to know which version of the app cache I have, I could surely just explicitly cache a script that sets some globals with the version data, and include that in my page.  There are other use cases for which there is no elegant workaround or no workaround at all.

The goal of this group as currently stated is to produce use cases rather than proposals.  I made an initial shot at documenting use cases [1] in the London meeting notes, and we're waiting on Tobie's greater expertise in spec development to improve them.

Cheers,

Andrew

[1] http://www.w3.org/community/fixing-appcache/wiki/Meeting_notes_14_August_2012#Use_cases


On 29 Oct 2012, at 22:38, Chris Wilson wrote:

> It was discussed at the Mozilla-hosted meeting that a version identifier, to help developers identify what appcache was in use, would be helpful.  I wanted to make a simple proposal for that: a version token in the SETTINGS section.  This would be the token "version" followed by a single simple token string (not necessarily numeric; up to the developer what they actually put in there), e.g.: 
> 
> SETTINGS
> version 1.0
> 
> this would then be exposed this on the applicationCache object:
> 
> readonly attribute DOMString version;
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> -Chris


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Received on Tuesday, 30 October 2012 08:53:15 UTC