The Financial Times' Labs team writes about web development, offline HTML5 apps, polyfills, and front-end performance.
Commenters link it for offline web app ideas, compared with older techniques like AppCache, and for the post on hiding URLs.
yes and no.
I spent 4 years at a large financial news company, where we benefited from many ex graunaids who decided to migrate over the river.
They helped us create the new front end to the website, to much acclaim. However, it was hard for a number of reasons(this is from the financial news company, not the gruan.):
1) The journalists hated change, especially as they couldn't see any benefit. They just want to keep their same interface exactly as it is, bugs and all. They also had an active union.
2) There is 20 years of "micro services" moving data from the CMS, through various things to allow stuff like translations, syndications (very important source of money) data extraction, meta data processing, physical page layout, and many many more. Most of which is done by a legacy ETL framework pushing to and from a solaris FTP server that is old enough to join the army.
3) there is more than one way to enter data into the CMS.
4) The type of article, and the data in said article changed depending on where it came from, and what services nobbled it.
5) looking after the journalist's interface, curating the data, sorting the articles and adding meta data, looking after paying subscribers, and finally the front end, were all different departments that refused to talk to each other.
This meant that unlike a rational place, there was no source of truth for the CMS. It wasn't like you could call up article 342923 and display it. There was no guarantee that it would have all…
The idea is by no means new. localStorage is old. So is the AppCache specifications that actually allows an application to go 'offline'. Gmail did this as early as 2009: http://googlecode.blogspot.sg/2009/04/gmail-for-mobile-html5-series-using.html
Unfortunately it's not as easy as it looks. I found that out when doing research for a weekend project. Here's an excellent A List Apart article detailing all the gotchas you can face while working with it: http://www.alistapart.com/articles/application-cache-is-a-douchebag/. The Financial Times Labs have an interesting article talking about an approach to deploying an offline app that uses the AppCache as little as possible: http://labs.ft.com/2012/08/basic-offline-html5-web-app/
And of course you can find information about it in places like Dive into HTML5 and MDN, by simply searching for them
They used to -- see http://www.kentlaw.edu/faculty/rwarner/classes/legalaspects/digital_signatures/VeriSign%20OnSite%20for%20Secure%20Server%20IDs.htm (§2.4, about half-way down) and http://labs.ft.com/2014/05/do-we-really-need-to-hide-the-url/
But it was removed in later versions of Netscape and Internet Explorer, because everyone turned it off as soon as they made their first search engine query.