Badly behaved captive portals

The app cache spec envisions the possibility of a captive portal (a
WiFi hotspot login page) being returned by a network rather than the
resource requested, and therefore considers an HTTP redirect response
to be an indication that the connection is offline for the purposes of
choosing to serve a fallback from cache rather than the response from
the network.

However, today we've been looking at the possibility that a captive
portal simply returns a login page on the URL you requested rather
than returning a redirect.  It wouldn't be good practice, but it would
be technically feasible.  In that situation, potentially our user will
get the captive portal page appearing in our app, and will have to -
rather ironically - turn off their network connectivity in order to
get the app to work.

1. Does anyone see a solution to this within the current app cache
spec / implementation?
2. In practice has anyone ever encountered a captive portal that
behaves like this?
3. Do we care about this use case?
4. If so, is it on the list (tobie?)

Andrew

Andrew Betts [skype:triblondon | @triblondon]
Director, FT Labs [labs.ft.com | 0870 085 2038 | @ftlabs]

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Received on Thursday, 20 September 2012 23:13:49 UTC