To be clear, my squabble is not an argument against SW in any way. SW affords a lot more control to the developer and makes this pattern significantly simpler to implement and deploy.
I'm simply pointing out that you can get most (if not all) of the claimed perf benefits using existing API's. Yes, it won't look as pretty, but if you want to deliver a better experience to existing + older browsers.. this is something to consider.
As a person who has spent weeks of my life trying to persuade AppCache + HTTP caches to do what I want (and who subsequently became a champion for the low-level primitives that became SW), I just don't agree with this.
It seems true in principle, until you try to actually get precisely the semantics you want, and then things go downhill fast. People should definitely try to find ways to use the HTTP cache more aggressively, but in practice, it's a giant slog with very little cross-browser consistency and total failures on mobile devices.
We should be thinking about how to deliver the best of both worlds: a great experience for older (non-SW) browsers, and an even better experience for those that do. The underlying patterns are effectively the same, SW just makes many things much simpler, and there is no reason to block on SW to start on this path.
Comments
To be clear, my squabble is not an argument against SW in any way. SW affords a lot more control to the developer and makes this pattern significantly simpler to implement and deploy.
I'm simply pointing out that you can get most (if not all) of the claimed perf benefits using existing API's. Yes, it won't look as pretty, but if you want to deliver a better experience to existing + older browsers.. this is something to consider.
As a person who has spent weeks of my life trying to persuade AppCache + HTTP caches to do what I want (and who subsequently became a champion for the low-level primitives that became SW), I just don't agree with this.
It seems true in principle, until you try to actually get precisely the semantics you want, and then things go downhill fast. People should definitely try to find ways to use the HTTP cache more aggressively, but in practice, it's a giant slog with very little cross-browser consistency and total failures on mobile devices.
Once again, I'm not arguing against SW.
We should be thinking about how to deliver the best of both worlds: a great experience for older (non-SW) browsers, and an even better experience for those that do. The underlying patterns are effectively the same, SW just makes many things much simpler, and there is no reason to block on SW to start on this path.