Robin Berjon

Hacking Around the Offline Web Manifesto

AppCache to Widget Converter

This is a simple, incomplete, and probably buggy proof of concept for the conversion of HTML5 AppCache to Widgets. The basic principle is simple: when presented with an AppCached web application, a browser could provide a UI item to "Save as Widget". The saved widget could then be toothed over to a phone, or simply used directly on the desktop. It's all very simple technology (I could, after all, hack it together in Perl very quickly) so the cost is rather low compared to the use cases it enables.

It also shows that the basic widget packaging technology could also be used for non-application packaging. For instance, it could be used as a standard format for "Save Complete Web Page" features in browsers. It would also allow people to write HTML documents (together with their CSS, JS, image, etc. dependencies) and distribute them in a format that is directly readable (as opposed to the annoyance of having to put them in a zip archive). This would enable a new standard way of exchanging textual documents and presentations that would kick Word, Powerpoint, and PDF so hard it's the cheapest known method for producing degenerate matter.

You can read more about it in its page in the Hacks section.

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