Me.Tech()

The craze for offline web has just started and we will see more and more momentum in this area. It was Brad Neuberg and the Dojo’s offline toolkit that started offering a swf based mechanism to access files offline, it was followed by some hacks and some other mechanisms. Now its the goog in action, with its Google Gears. The OS plugin needs to be installed in your system to be able to access some Google services like Greader offline, in fact thats where I first noticed it.  I am still yet to checkout a working demo, but I am not completely convinced about an installable plugin, it just ruins the experience of the web. Think about it for sometime and you will realize that you will probably never go offline, online except for on your personal laptop or PC, but still a plugin independent implementation would have definitely be rocking.

I am a big fan of new technologies, right from js frameworks to flex to apollo to silverlight, I have always taken pleasure in checking out possibilities. I have even made proof of concepts whenever I could. But frankly speaking , adding download and install plugins like the flash player, silverlight runtime etc is seriously an overhead. The web dev team in my office still develops for IE 5 and Netscape Navigator; you really cannot expect to deliver next gen apps to such people. Whats more depressing is that a majority of the populous consists of those people . I think the success of js frameworks like dojo, yui , prototype was the fact that their model didn’t require any new tricks to your usual browsing habits. In fact, many of these frameworks gracefully degrade down based on your WYSIWYG’s configuration. I don’t think its safe to call these overhead based technologies like gears, sliverlight, apollo – web technologies. But , thats just my opinion.

Well how about a install all pack which contains all the runtimes required. A single update patch on XP Service pack 3 and Vista Service pack. That should make at least 60 to 70 pc of the world ready to receive these technologies. But back to the point , Google Gears .  Will update after checking it out. I like the promise of space, the reader promises almost 2000 articles and thats a lot of space   let m wait it out.