Re: Change proposal for ISSUE-173: split-appcache

On Wed, Oct 12, 2011 at 8:13 AM, Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net> wrote:
>
> On 12/10/2011, at 4:04 PM, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 12 Oct 2011 13:56:09 +0900, Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net> wrote:
>>> • Rationale: AppCache is clearly not of the same maturity and quality as the rest of the HTML5 specification; take-up has been quite slow, and it's often remarked that it's confusing and surprising to developers. While the W3C is planning a workshop to help adoption, it's not at all clear that AppCache is a suitable base for offline Web applications. Furthermore, it is a clearly separable part of the HTML specification.
>>
>> A. It is widely implemented and used quite a bit too.
>
> Those are by nature subjective judgements, of course. However, the fact that the W3C feels the need to sponsor a workshop whose goal can be accurately paraphrased as "let's figure out why the hell people aren't using AppCache and Widgets," it's a good indication that something's wrong.

We don't know yet how badly app cache is wrong after you have working
code developed for it and how much the badness relates to lack of
diagnostics during development, development-time code getting stuck in
the cache, etc. (i.e. how much tools could save us on top of the base
mechanism).

In any case, "widely implemented" isn't really a subjective claim,
it's easy to check on caniuse: http://caniuse.com/#feat=offline-apps

Even if the conclusion was that app cache is pain to work with, it
doesn't follow that it can be removed from the platform or that we
could spec-wise pretend it doesn't exist.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Wednesday, 12 October 2011 12:10:48 UTC