I agree, but am not sure for the exact reasons you state. Put simply, offline applications need to support partial failure. The author of this article seems t

I agree, but am not sure for the exact reasons you state. Put simply, offline applications need to support partial failure. The author of this article seems to want to write web apps without having to have much concern for partial failure. That is my own summary and take-away. If you agree, then we are on the same page. Not dealing with partial failure means succombing to Fallacies of Distributed Computing - period. I wouldn't even trust the browser to do atomic swaps of cache', anyway, and I wouldn't even want to think about what that code would look like, or what the spec for the author's ideal would look like. Bottom line: The author is defining words like "brittle" from one perspective only. What he wants is probably better provided by a library on top of caching. Moreover, I shriek at the idea of an application having to know its "size". That exposes the representation of the resource.