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April 10, 2006
Occasional connectivity
Occasional connectivity: This New York Times article may linkrot soon... John Markoff talks of Webaroo, a company which packages up slices of the current webosphere for local storage, so you can use "The Web" at times when you may not have a good connection. Their cache refresh not only extends control past the caches found in document browsers, but when you reconnect their system checks with servers to look for document updates, similar to the original purpose behind RDF/RSS. Why pay connection costs each time you wish to retrieve a document, when it's now just as easy to control your own local copy of that document? Next step: getting such a system to work with active content which accommodates user input, like forms and photogalleries and blogging and all, instead of just static documents -- to go for two-way synch, and to handle various application states while offline. Fun times.
Posted by John Dowdell at April 10, 2006 12:10 PM
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Couple more thoughts....
Some content providers will likely object, I reckon, to what they perceive as an unauthorized reuse of their materials... they won't realize advertising revenue from their work, for instance. Current browser caches offer a difference in degree, but not of kind.
If you have Adobe Acrobat, in either Standard or Professional versions, then you can also slurp in a site and its outbound links, to a desired level of deepness... another way to get the same offline functionality.
Posted by: John Dowdell at April 10, 2006 03:10 PM
Too bad it's Windows-only. My desktop PC at work is always connected; it's my PowerBook that's not.
Posted by: Stefan Gruenwedel at April 10, 2006 03:12 PM