Site Updates and AppCache depreciation

I am happy to announce that this site is nearly complete. There are a few additional features I still intend to add, mainly to do with offline viewing and user experience, but all-in-all I am quiet happy with it. Now I intend to mainly focus on populating this blog with more content and writing a little more frequently. Also for those of you wondering if pagination is working, it is, completely! Both on the tag pages and the blog page, however currently I don't have enough articles to trigger multiple pages (greater then 6 is required), so the pagination next/prev/first/last page links at the bottom of the page are plain text. I at some point may address this but it will only really be an issue for another few articles and could be resolved quiet easily in the case of 6 or less articles.

Recently, I came across an article saying to my dismay that the Application Cache API is being depreciated in firefox. I say to my dismay because this site uses Application Cache so it can be viewed offline, which means I'm going to have to refactor my site for Application Caches replacement. Some would say offline viewing is overkill for a blog but initially I attempted it as a learning exercise, but am pretty happy with the end result of a pretty smooth offline viewing experience.

Needless to say, while setting up Application Cache, it seemed like it wasn't a very flexible technology. I was able to make it do what I wanted (for the most part) but things like selectively caching an article wasn't doable with Application Cache. I still intend on offering this feature, however I was going to implement it via offline storage as it couldn't be done dynamically on the client side with Application Cache. There is a better alternative though, ServiceWorkers which replaces Application Cache provides the flexibility to provide just this; dynamic caching based on whatever conditions the developer sees fit. In a nut shell, ServiceWorkers act as a proxy running in a Worker (thus in its own thread) between your web application and the browser.

Anyways, as I read through the documentation for ServiceWorkers I'll be sure to update my blog to use them in place of Application Cache. I'm looking forward to experimenting with this new web spec, and thinks it hold great promise for the future.

As a closing note: one thing that worries me about web applications becoming able to deliver similar experiences to classical native programs is that of freedom and availability of source code. Of course, this is why the AGPL exists, but none-the-less, I fear the day when the majority of users simply use a web browser to do their computing. It will leave them locked to a particular service without the ability to even reverse engineer the application because all communication can take place via an encrypted connection.