Building a New Web: Offline Access

February 11th, 2010 by Kurt Zenisek Categories: Internet Technology Tags: html 5, kurt zenisek, web site design, Website Design

With the rise of small and easy-to-use applications (commonly known as “Apps”) created by the popularity of the iPhone comes many things to learn from and integrate into website design. One of these new capabilities is to be able to store information locally so the user is able to access their information while they don’t have access to the Internet (aka “offline access”). A side benefit is that there’s no need to re-download things that don’t change, like a downloadable app, so it’s a much faster user experience. This is also great for those that have Internet access, but for one reason or another is slower than usual.

To help speed up the adoption of this technology is the increase of Internet enabled portable devices and computers being used along with the increase of websites that provide software as a web service. Software as a service is where a more traditional program that you download to your computer has been converted into a Web site. It still offers the same capabilities in addition to being able to access the same information from anywhere that has internet connectivity.

Offline access is new and isn’t yet supported by the majority of Web browsers that people use. So there’s something that’s lost in the process of turning a program into an online application at the moment, and that’s the ability to access the information without internet connectivity. Once the offline access capability is more ubiquitous, you will be able to see this feature being offered by more and more Web sites. It bridges the gap between the benefits of a program that you download and an online application. Google has been using a similar technology for their services called “Google Gears” that they created themselves, but they have stated that they will be moving over to this new standard introduced in HTML5. There’s already iPhone specific Web applications that are using offline storage, so there’s no need to wait for it to re-download over the cellphone’s Internet access to use it. This is one small part of HTML5 that will be a key component to opening up what’s possible on the web.