Discussion: What are the pros/cons of the ipwb web interface acting as a PWA?

[machawk1]

Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) allow a web site/application to have some representation in the OS outside of the browser with the intention being that they can also work offline to some extent. This might make sense for a locally hosted ipwb instance to visually interface with the local instance.

• Would there be any advantage (e.g., usability-wise) to doing this?
• Are there significant ramification to making the web interface cause a browser to respond to it being a PWA?
• Would this be at all applicable to remote instances / ipwb replay systems?

EDIT: Maybe not as obvious, but from what I can tell, PWAs heavily use Service/WebWorkers, which we already utilize with the Reconstructive integration. Because of this, I would particularly like @ibnesayeed to weigh in.

Re: #26

[ibnesayeed]

The current feature set of IPWB has very little to gain with it being a PWA, though, there is no harm as such. Some selling points of PWAs are listed below:

• Offline access of sites - if the purpose of IPWB is to replay archive from localhost, then disconnecting from the Internet is not an issue, and if the purpose is to replay from a large remote archive, then there is not a lot that can be cached locally for offline access
• Asynchronous pre-caching - archival collections are usually diverse and there are not a lot of shared resources that we can benefit from by pre-caching
• Notifications - there are not a lot of interesting events in the life-cycle of an archival replay where notifications would play a critical role, at least not for the feature set we support yet
• Mobile device friendliness - a lot of PWA goals revolve around making mobile web experience better, which is not the primary platform to consume the archived web yet (I do not have any research pointers to support this claim though)

Our use of ServiceWorker is orthogonal to how it is used in PWAs.

[machawk1]

Thank you for your insights, @ibnesayeed.

[machawk1]

In using more PWAs lately, the native feel in the macOS dock makes me wonder whether it is possible to interact with the icon via drag-and-drop. I am thinking here of adding and/or manipulating the indices and WARCs. The paradigms would be different on different OSes.

Per @ibnesayeed and the work for #710, caching for the contents of WACZ files might also be an advantage, as indexing large files with many warc-response records is time consuming (partially due to #631 still being in limbo).