Well sorry you can't use some chat app without internet connection, our bad.

Not everything is a chat application. But even a chat application can and should partially work without an internet connection: Reading old messages and composing new ones can work offline.

That has nothing to do with Javascript. If you use canonical, cacheable URIs for your requests, my method above works fine.

In my day job, I'm working on a CRM and sales system that is 100% web based and does work offline and is even offline-first (I love you Germany, but your mobile network sucks).

There may be many other problems with it but offline is mostly a solved problem in the web world.

Quick experiment: In a new Firefox profile, I opened a couple of websites [1]. Then I went offline and tried to load them again. Every time I just got the default "server not found" page of Firefox.

"Offline" is no more solved "not hijacking scrolling", "linkable URLs" and "not re-inventing <a href> badly".

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/, https://www.google.com/, https://en.wikipedia.org, https://www.reddit.com/, https://www.nytimes.com

Did you try right clicking and choosing "Save as..."?

As I said before, it's a 5-minute thing to get started with service-workers. Web-sites can use that and then you don't even need to save. There is this great offline library, fellow developers! Use it! What other platform gives you such easy-to-use offline capabilities?

> "not hijacking scrolling", "linkable URLs" and "not re-inventing <a href> badly"

You are dealing with a Turing-complete language here. Navigation situation is still way better than the applets.

What is the alternative you are supporting instead the current situation?

> As I said before, it's a 5-minute thing to get started with service-workers. Web-sites can use that and then you don't even need to save.

I don't care if websites can use that if they don't.

> You are dealing with a Turing-complete language here.

That's the fucking problem.

> What is the alternative you are supporting instead the current situation?

Using a proper application platform instead of a pile of hacks on top of the web. Without that pile of hacks, the web would actually be usable because publishers would not be able to break the UX.

> I don't care if websites can use that if they don't.

It's new, and you can still save pages. Browsers will do their best to include all resources they depend as well.

> Using a proper application platform instead

Which one? Is there any cross-platform one with consistent design and UX? I don't think so.

> It's new, and you can still save pages

No, I can't. That does not work reliably.

> Browsers will do their best

In other words, they will fail.

> Which one? Is there any cross-platform one with consistent design and UX? I don't think so.

Frankly, even Electron applications are better than making web pages that behave incorrectly.

> No, I can't. That does not work reliably.

In all your given examples, it does.

> Frankly, even Electron applications are better than making web pages that behave incorrectly.

You know that 90% of Electron apps do not have any native function calls and are just wrappers on top of a web-app?

I just don't understand what you are criticizing anymore.

> You know that 90% of Electron apps do not have any native function calls

That does not make sense. If they made no native function calls, they could not even display a window.