I get a lot of flak from people for saying that the web can never be a serious application platform until it gets Offline right. I’m usually told ubiquitous wifi and 3G/EVDO will make offline apps obsolete. Or that Adam Bosworth obsesses far too much about “the person on the airplane [when] airplanes are actually getting Internet connections.”

Of course, anyone who has faced a broadband outage (or traipsed around small Welsh villages without cellphone signals) will know that losing your apps along with your connection doesn’t sound like fun. On the other hand, Alchemy seems no closer to shipping today than it did when it was first announced.

However, Julien Couvreur’s new “Take It With You” Wiki shows what can be done today with a bit of imagination. TiwyWiki is rudimentary but gets the online/offline experience exactly right. Neat hack, and I’m definitely going to try and apply this in some of my own projects. (This requires Flash 8 to be installed, but future variations on this technique could just as easily use the browser’s own scriptable security/storage model when the browser vendors get around to implementing such capabilities.)