HTML 5 offline web applications

David Corvoysier — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 17:21:21 +0000

HTML 5 provides a new caching feature to support offline web applications.

Basically, you can specify in a specific file called the “cache manifest” the caching policy to apply to a particular web page.

To activate the HTML 5 caching feature for a specific document, you only need to specify the URI of the cache manifest file in the manifest attribute of the element.

...

The file that references the cache manifest file is called the master entry.

Please note that to be properly parsed by the browser, the manifest file must have a text/cache-manifest MIME type (which means that you will need either to add a custom file type extension binding to your web server or to specify manually the mime-type, for instance using PHP header directive).

A cache manifest file typically looks like this:

CACHE MANIFEST
index.html
style.css
images/logo.png

NETWORK:
search.php

This file specifies several files to cache (the cache explicit entries), and then specifies that search.php should never be cached (it is said to belong to the online white list), so that any attempt to access that file will bypass the cache.

Whenever the user browses to the page corresponding to a document to which a cache manifest is associated, the browser must check on the server if the latter has been modified:

If it hasn’t, then the cached content is used,
If a new version of the cache manifest exists, then the cached content is considered as staled and reloaded from the server.

The cache manifest for a document may also contain fallback entries that can be used if the browser can’t retrieve the original content. Below is an example where a static image is used when the retrieval of a dynamically generated image fails:

CACHE MANIFEST
FALLBACK:
images/mirror-effect.php server-busy.jpg

HTML 5 also defines an application cache API to manually trigger cache updates:

update(): updates the cache for the current document in the background,
swapCache(): reflow the HTML document using updated cached content,
onupdateready(): event triggered when the cache content has been updated,
onobsolete(): event triggered when the cache content has been marked as obsolete,
…

Kaizou » cache-manifest

HTML 5 offline web applications