A bookmarklet to help you figure out what files you might want to put in your cache manifest for offline storage.
This is brilliant technique by Remy!
If you’ve got a custom offline page that lists previously-visited pages (like I do on my site), you don’t have to choose between localStorage or IndexedDB—you can read the metadata straight from the HTML of the cached pages instead!
This seems forehead-smackingly obvious in hindsight. I’m totally stealing this.
It’s really great to hear about how Microsoft will be promoting progressive web apps as first-class citizens …but it’s really unhelpful that they’re using this fudgy definition:
Progressive Web Apps are just great web sites that can behave like native apps—or, perhaps, Progressive Web Apps are just great apps, powered by Web technologies and delivered with Web infrastructure.
Although they also give a more technical definition:
Technologically speaking, PWAs are web apps, progressively enhanced with modern web technologies (Service Worker, Fetch networking, Cache API, Push notifications, Web App Manifest) to provide a more app-like experience.
Nice try, slipping notifications in there like that, but no. No, no, no. Let’s not fool ourselves into thinking that one of the most annoying “features” of native apps is even desirable on the web.
If you want to use notifications, fine. But they are absolutely not a requirement for a progressive web app.
(A responsive design, on the other hand, totally is.)
Here’s an interesting insight on how WebKit is going to handle the cleanup of unused service workers and caches:
Service worker and Cache API stored information will grow as a user is browsing content. To keep only the stored information that is useful to the user, WebKit will remove unused service worker registrations after a period of a few weeks. Caches that do not get opened after a few weeks will also be removed.
Turning your existing website into a progressive web “app”—a far more appealing prospect than trying to create an entirely new app-shell architecture:
…they are an enhancement of your existing website which should take no longer than a few hours and have no negative effect on unsupported browsers.
A handy one-page cheatsheet for using HTML5’s appcache manifest file for offline storage.