{"id":1941,"date":"2007-06-05T11:39:11","date_gmt":"2007-06-05T15:39:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/2007\/06\/05\/google-gears-too-much-interface\/"},"modified":"2007-06-05T11:39:11","modified_gmt":"2007-06-05T15:39:11","slug":"google-gears-too-much-interface","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/2007\/06\/google-gears-too-much-interface\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Gears: too much interface?"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I had a quick look at Google Gears<\/a> this morning. Unlike some<\/a>, I do most definitely see value in supporting disconnected scenarios, not because I don’t see pervasive wired and wireless networks being the rule in the not-too-distant future – I do – but because I understand that networks are unreliable<\/a>. That said, I do have some concerns about how Gears was put together.<\/p>\n\n

My primary concern is that I’ve always felt that supporting offline use in existing browsers required more innovation of implementation<\/em> rather than interface, whereas Gears is all about interface. What I mean by that is that I believe that a better, more easily deployable and usable solution would be for Mozilla<\/a> itself to tweak the implementations of its HTTP stack, cache, and XMLHttpRequest object. Instead, Gears gives us new interfaces like LocalServer<\/a>, which developers are supposed to use to check for valid cached representations before hitting up XHR: something XHR could very well do itself, largely transparently (I expect – haven’t considered all the backwards-compatibility issues).<\/p>\n\n

Now, Gears could very well be something that was deployed for its ability to enable features today<\/em>, because Google didn’t want to have to wait for HTML 5<\/a> (and its equivalent of client-side storage<\/a>) to be deployed. And from that perspective it’s great (though requiring a plugin is a bit of a pain). I just hope that the Gears folks are talking with Hixie<\/a> and Mozilla about where to draw the line here.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"So I had a quick look at Google Gears this morning. Unlike some, I do most definitely see value in supporting disconnected scenarios, not because I don’t see pervasive wired and wireless networks being the rule in the not-too-distant future – I do – but because I understand that networks are unreliable. That said, I […]","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[3,12,17,30,34,36,40],"class_list":["post-1941","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-ajax","tag-google","tag-mobile","tag-standards","tag-w3c","tag-web20","tag-xml"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1941","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1941"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1941\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1941"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1941"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.markbaker.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1941"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}