Is there any way round this for HTML5 apps? I know you can save an app icon on iphone but when you launch it just launches safari which seems to make a network

Is there any way round this for HTML5 apps? I know you can save an app icon on iphone but when you launch it just launches safari which seems to make a network request to check if the site is up to date? (Sorry, I'm a bit naive about all this HTML5 stuff.) e.g. Gmail in safari on iphone is useless when you get long latency situations like this. Is there a way round that?