I have been thinking a lot about what a browser should have available to a web developer in this Web2.0 world we live in, and I would like to share some thoughts:
- Cached data storage, by domain - Think of this as very large cookies, if you will. In this day and age of 500GB hard drives, the limits of cookies are ludicrously small. The biggest difference between cookies and this would be that cached data storage would just be a big cache on disk, accessible via javascript (maybe even URI, like cache:), and would not get sent to the server.
Imagine this capability for an application like FeedLounge. Imagine the ability for FeedLounge to start downloading and caching your unread items for you to read at your lesiure, regardless of your connection status. It would also be able to keep track of the items that you mark as read, and update the server once you come back online. This will allow you to read your FeedLounge items even while on the plane, or lost^D^D^D^D vacationing in Nova Scotia.
I am not talking about unlimited access to the hard drive, pulling files from wherever. I am talking about a simple api to set() and get() data by a key. I don’t care how it is implemented.
Here’s a random thought: why not just install SQLLite with a JS access API into the browser for all web app developers to (ab)use?
I am also not talking about pre-fetching ala Google Web Accelerator. That is just plain stupid/crazy.
Many smart people have been talking about this very thing: Stephen O’Grady(item number 9, and yes, Steve, you should switch to WordPress), Jason Kottke, even this. - Controllable history - Some people complain about AJAX-based apps, and how they don’t act like real web pages. If I as a web developer had control of what my history stack looked like, you would be a much happier web application user.
I know people are going to raise their security flags, and that is a good thing. Why not let me do whatever I want with the URLs in the history stack that belong to my domain. That way the security people can be happy that I am not pissing with eBay purchase history, and I can give you the appication user the best experience possible.
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