  The Meaning of “Offline”  “Web” and “online” are two closely
associated terms, downright synonymous to many people. So why on
earth would we talk about “offline” web technologies, and what
does the term even mean?   However, it gets more nuanced than
“always-offline”. Another class of applications are “online-
offline” apps (sometimes just called “offline apps”, somewhat
ambiguously). These apps are ultimately intended to sync with
the cloud, but can survive periods of downtime. The downtime
might be an interim loss of connection, like passing through a
tunnel, or an extended period of offline activity, like a long-
haul flight. Online-offline applications will handle these cases
with varying degrees of gracefulness. An example is GMail’s
offline facility.   Online-offline applications comes at the
cost of increased complexity, and you ought to consider whether
offline support is justified. The argument against this mode is
best summed up in a famous article from a few years back. David
Hanson makes the argum