The problem I have with offline HTML5 applications, on the iPhone at least, is that when your phone thinks it is on the internet because AT&T is servicing it wi

The problem I have with offline HTML5 applications, on the iPhone at least, is that when your phone thinks it is on the internet because AT&T is servicing it with 4 bars, but only providing a few dozen bits per second of effective bandwidth. So your user decides to run your application and touches the icon on the home screen ("not a desktop"). • Your application launches and displays your splash screen instantly. (Everything from here out is your fault in the user's eyes.) • Safari decides to use HTTP to verify the manifest file and see how things are. It also, perversely, does a query to load the splash screen that is already showing. • Now your user stares at the splash screen for 60 seconds wondering what kind of an idiot you are and how badly you must hate him while AT&T shifts a couple thousand bits of manifest response to you in their most profit enhancing manner. This can be mitigated by pushing cache times up, but you either push them to infinity and explicitly change URLs to catch updates or roll dice with your user's experience. I'd put a release number in the URL, set the expirations to doomsday, and bump the release number for each update, but the URL of the first page loaded in the app is fixed when the user bookmarks it onto the desktop.