On Fri, Apr 17, 2009 at 3:11 PM, Marco Schuster marco@harddisk.is-a-geek.org wrote:
Isn't GG supposed to be an implementation of localStorage for browsers who don't support it yet
I don't think Gears uses the localStorage API. It seems to use its own APIs. But I've never used either, to be fair.
(does any browser support localStorage *now*, btw?)?
IE8 does, albeit maybe with a few quirks. I'm pretty sure the most recent Safari does, although Google is unhelpful on this point. Firefox 3.5 betas do. I don't know about Opera.
What could be stored is JS bits likely not to change THAT often, i.e. if Wikipedia is ever going to make a WYSIWYG editor available (Wikia has it!!!) its JS files could be cached, same for those tiny little flag icons , the wikipedia ball, the background of the page... maybe even some parts of the sitewide CSS.
All of those things should already be cached by clients. On stock Firefox 3, the only things my browser actually sends requests for (checking using the Firebug Net tab) on a typical page view is the page itself, and images specific to that page.
Actually, it could be expanded to store whole articles (then simply copy over or enhance http://code.google.com/intl/de-DE/apis/gears/articles/gearsmonkey.html - I'm gonna modify it for german Wikipedia when i've got some time).
That would be unreliable. The article might have changed, so you'd have to do an HTTP request anyway to get the 304. And in that case, again, the browser will have the HTML page cached already.