Re: HTML5's Offline-first Council of Trent

On Tue, 15 Mar 2016 at 12:14 Richard Maher <maherrj@googlemail.com> wrote:

> Your willingness, nay preference, to serve up stale, outdated data, is an
> exercise in self-flagellation that only a fellow sicko could understand
>
This is not the intent in the pattern you quote (
https://jakearchibald.com/2014/offline-cookbook/#cache-then-network).

The goal is to get cached data on screen then update it. This is because
cached data is often fine as a first pass.

If I'm going to my messaging app to remind me where I agreed to meet
someone, cached data is fine. If I'm going to my fitness app to find out
how long it took me to run two miles last week, cached data is fine. If I'm
looking up the day for my flight, cached data is fine.

But it doesn't stop there. The network is used, if available, to update
both the content on the screen (in some non-disruptive way) and in the
cache.

The benefit of having data locally on the device is you don't need an
internet connection to get it, if you refuse to show it until a network
request as settled or timed out, you're throwing away the benefit.

The offline-first pattern not only improves things for offline users, it
improves things for everyone whose connection to the internet is slower
than their device's storage.