Application Cache - HTML 5

Question

In one of the online documents that talks about appcache for HTML5, it indicates that the cached files get updated once an offline user reconnects. I checked the original HTML5 appcache definition by W3, and I am not able to find anything that supports this statement.

Does anyone know if this is to be true?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

MDN says the following, although if you scroll up on that page it says it's being deprecated.

• If an application cache exists, the browser loads the document and its associated resources directly from the cache, without accessing the network. This speeds up the document load time.
• The browser then checks to see if the cache manifest has been updated on the server.
• If the cache manifest has been updated, the browser downloads a new version of the manifest and the resources listed in the manifest. This is done in the background and does not affect performance significantly.

And logic tells me that it would also depend on the app you're using, server you're trying to connect to and any special settings it might have, how long your browser keeps it's history, what it keeps, and if you saved the page to view offline - whether or not you have all the code/images saved in the right location(s).

Example:

Imagine you saved a page to view offline, and that page has a JS event handler that ran a while loop that did an ajax request every n seconds to do something, like make a number on a page change as long as you were online... As long as the loop is running, you suddenly connect to the internet, and it makes the request to the proper url with the right arguments, then it should go through, even though the url in your browser might say something like file:///C:/Users/you/Desktop/....

I've done this before, even though my url was like the one above. One time I was using braintree's drop-in javascript to a website, and using it's api on my backend. Trying to load the page when offline = Nothing. Online = Updated the spot on the page just fine when I had the required arguments, and it was pointing to the right url. If I got offline again, I could refresh the page, see the same images loaded in the <div>, but I couldn't send any data with it.