Building an Offline Page for Theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Building an Offline Page for Theguardian.com
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Re: Building an Offline Page for Theguardian.com
#2I am not up to date on this kind of technology, but reading the article, this sound terrible! Not the guardians implementation, but the concept of locally "caching", though I would call it installing, executable code, that can then intercept network requests and basically do whatever it wants? Why would we think this is a good idea?
I am not surprised by Chrome doing something like this. But firefox too? I hope this will be opt-in.
Re: Building an Offline Page for Theguardian.com
#3I am not up to date on this kind of technology, but reading the article, this sound terrible! Not the guardians implementation, but the concept of locally "caching", though I would call it installing, executable code, that can then intercept network requests and basically do whatever it wants? Why would we think this is a good idea? I am not surprised by Chrome doing something like this. But firefox too? I hope this…
Service workers have been around for a while. As far as I know their capabilities are restricted to the domain that includes them. So the guardian website can only intercept network requests made from itself.
Re: Building an Offline Page for Theguardian.com
#4Old 2015
Re: Building an Offline Page for Theguardian.com
#5I am not up to date on this kind of technology, but reading the article, this sound terrible! Not the guardians implementation, but the concept of locally "caching", though I would call it installing, executable code, that can then intercept network requests and basically do whatever it wants? Why would we think this is a good idea? I am not surprised by Chrome doing something like this. But firefox too? I hope this…
Service workers have been around for a while. As far as I know their capabilities are restricted to the domain that includes them. So the guardian website can only intercept network requests made from itself.
Well, just goes to show you how out of date I am!
Though after reading up on it, I still don't like it much. It makes the web behave in ways I don't expect it to and I don't really see why anyone would really need this, unless they want to fundamentally change the way the web is expected to work.
Re: Building an Offline Page for Theguardian.com
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
Service workers have been around for a while. As far as I know their capabilities are restricted to the domain that includes them. So the guardian website can only intercept network requests made from itself.
Well, just goes to show you how out of date I am! Though after reading up on it, I still don't like it much. It makes the web behave in ways I don't expect it to and I don't really see why anyone would really need this, unless they want to fundamentally change the way the web is expected to work.
It's main usecase is for making web apps work offline. This allows you to "install" a web app rather than a full-blown native app. If iOS supported it properly, then you could have truly cross platform, sandboxed mobile apps.
There used to be a declarative version AppCache, but in pracrice that made cache invalidation almost impossible to manage properly.
Re: Building an Offline Page for Theguardian.com
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
Service workers have been around for a while. As far as I know their capabilities are restricted to the domain that includes them. So the guardian website can only intercept network requests made from itself.
Well, just goes to show you how out of date I am! Though after reading up on it, I still don't like it much. It makes the web behave in ways I don't expect it to and I don't really see why anyone would really need this, unless they want to fundamentally change the way the web is expected to work.
You can check "about:serviceworkers" on Firefox, and see how many sites install a worker when visiting their page. Spoilers: a whole lot of them
Re: Building an Offline Page for Theguardian.com
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, just goes to show you how out of date I am! Though after reading up on it, I still don't like it much. It makes the web behave in ways I don't expect it to and I don't really see why anyone would really need this, unless they want to fundamentally change the way the web is expected to work.
You can check "about:serviceworkers" on Firefox, and see how many sites install a worker when visiting their page. Spoilers: a whole lot of them
Mine shows none. Could be because of permanent private browsing. Do people still run browser on their personal computer without permanent private browsing enabled?
Re: Building an Offline Page for Theguardian.com
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can check "about:serviceworkers" on Firefox, and see how many sites install a worker when visiting their page. Spoilers: a whole lot of them
Mine shows none. Could be because of permanent private browsing. Do people still run browser on their personal computer without permanent private browsing enabled?
Do people still run browsers? I wouldn't know because I access the web exclusively using telnet.
Re: Building an Offline Page for Theguardian.com
#10I am not up to date on this kind of technology, but reading the article, this sound terrible! Not the guardians implementation, but the concept of locally "caching", though I would call it installing, executable code, that can then intercept network requests and basically do whatever it wants? Why would we think this is a good idea? I am not surprised by Chrome doing something like this. But firefox too? I hope this…
It can't do whatever it wants. It can make responses for requests that would go to that particular website without actually making the request, that's it - that is, the website can provide some code that makes local responses on its behalf for things it could respond to anyway. It can't intercept (or even see) anything for other sites. That's a significant difference from installing executable code in the form of a standalone binary.
I do agree, more broadly, that there's a place in this world for a s web-like thing that only lets sites provide text and minimal formatting and doesn't let them run any code at all, even in a constrained/sandboxed environment. (https://gemini.circumlunar.space/ seems like the most promising thing in this space.) But the web hasn't been that since 1995 when they released LiveScript.