The manifest cache has very limited use cases. It’s mostly used for serving online content offline or allowing the user to do something that is online such as Google Drive offline. For instance, if you cache an entire page on your website (all the resource are in the manifest file) a user would be able to browse it when they are offline.
The issue is the manifest file is only good for two kinds of sites/applications.
There are applications that allow someone to do something such as Gmail or Google Docs these have offline extensions in the chrome web store. These allow the user to do something offline that they normally would be inacessible. This is a good time to use a manifest file so the user can do something.
The other is a content site so you can read something. This is a terrible time to use a manifest file. Because content served offline has no visible indication that it is offline. So a user can browser a page and go to the next one but if they never visit that page when they are online they can’t necessarily visit it. Also, if you keep telling the browser to cache each page the user is visiting your cache keeps getting bigger and bigger until it reaches the limit set by the browser since there is no way to specify a purge limit or how much to cache.
Now why did I write this? EHH hard to say the point is lol this will likely not be used in W3TC or in any other caching plugin because it’s a terrible technology xD and most people won’t have a use for it.
The best thing to do is if you are running a website with a manifest file is to manually minify everything. I use a couple tools for CSS/JavaScript Compression.
JS Minification: https://closure-compiler.appspot.com/home
http://refresh-sf.com/
CSS Minification:http://refresh-sf.com/
Thread Starter
Homika
(@homika)
I was thinking more along the lines of caching just .js and .css files, not the whole website, with the purpose of loading them quickly for repeat visitors.
From what I read, with HTML5 cache cached files will be used not only offline, but online also if cache of the requested file exist with the browser and manifest file didn’t change since its last version. Wouldn’t using local cache like this for .js and .css files speed up the loading?
That sounds good but that’s what the browser cache option does. You are telling the browser to cache static resources such as images/js/CSS until they expire or are cleared. They aren’t downloaded on page load then.
