[sugar] 9.1 Proposal: "Asynchronous internet"

[C. Scott Ananian]

I've wanted to see a consistent off-line caching architecture in our
system for a while.  Some ideas:
    * Integration of wwwoffle with small local cache
    * Content bundles to seed that cache
    * Mechanism to request downloads later

Basically, I'd like to unify the Wikibrowse activity, library content
bundles, and a user-controllable off-line cache into one consistent
framework, integrated with the XS but also usable standalone.
Installing a content bundle should be almost exactly the same thing as
installing new content into the offline cache, with only some small
hook for making it appear in the XO home page.  Much of the fancy
tricks which Wikibrowse does should be in the offline caching
framework; the Wikibrowse "activity" itself would mostly just consist
of the article-selection mechanism: *which* pages we should grab and
push into the offline cache.  Finally, there should be a mechanism for
a teacher to efficiently collect requests for unavailable content from
the students, possible do some filtering to remove objectionable
requests, take those requests to the nearest town with internet
access, download the requested content, take it back to the school,
and distribute the content to the students (possibly by just
installing it on the school server).
 --scott

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                         ( http://cscott.net/ )