Over on his Tecosytems blog, Redmonk principal analyst Stephen O’Grady picks up a conversation that he and I first batted back and forth on Twitter. Twitter, with its 140-character limit to each post, can cramp even the simplest of dialogs. Take a complex topic like offline persistence of anything (a single page, data, applications, etc.) in a browser and I’m glad he took it to the blogosphere. Sometimes only a blog will do.
Stephen offered more details on what he wants, but so far can’t have. Something real simple (I hope I get it right now): Regardless of the current state of connectivity, the ability to bring back the most recent set of a browser’s tabs complete with any user data that might have been entered into those tabs. Not necessarily the whole app. Just that one page.
Having lost entire blog entries because my browser crashed while I was completing a TypePad or WordPress form (thankfully, the newer versions of WordPress auto-save much the same way Gmail auto-saves), I can completely relate. When I bring the browser back to life, I could care less about a functioning offline version of WordPress’ authoring tools. I just want all that hard work back.
