Last modified: 2014-02-12 23:35:57 UTC
I would like to see Mediawiki give users the option to cache content pages (explicitly chosen individual pages or whenever-visited pages, entire category of pages, the entire site, etc., with the current snapshot if not entire page histories) via IndexedDB--the NoSQL database standard agreed upon by all major browsers (including Microsoft) as the way forward--for offline reading (and ultimately querying). Bug 45980 would also be a precondition for full offlineability of Mediawiki as an application, and its ideal use case would be for allowing offline querying as well, but implementation of IndexedDB could still be of use in the interim for performance and possibly third party browser add-ons which sought to enable querying today) if Mediawiki content could be cached using IndexedDB. In response to a request for full offlineability of Mediawiki, in bug 28706 comment 7 it was stated "We have time to time such type of remark advocating a nosql DB system to sotre WP offline. The problem is that as far as I know, none of them is as efficient in term of compression/access speed/resource consumption as ZIM. This would be interesting to get some benchmark about indexdb with big corpus of Wikipedia content (with pictures) to see if indexdb could be a valid choice, at all, to store big Wikipedia contents offline." I therefore would like to ask that this request begin with such an investigation of efficiency (although as a new technology, I would surmise IndexedDB implementations might have some way to go), but even if it was not as fast as other offline technologies, the integration into the Mediawiki platform would still offer the unique benefit of being immediately usable as such without extra software installation or downloads and could be implemented in a manner to allow the user to choose which specific content (if not all) they wanted to be stored for offline use, so I would hope that should such an investigation find some relative shortcomings of IndexedDB, that implementation still be pursued. Browser restrictions or need for permission to increase memory size would need to be taken into account. Docs at http://www.w3.org/TR/IndexedDB/