Going offline with microformats

This was originally published on my own site.

For the offline page on my website, I’ve been using a mixture of the Cache API and the localStorage API. My service worker script uses the Cache API to store copies of pages for offline retrieval. But I used the localStorage API to store metadata about the page—title, description, and so on. Then, my offline page would rifle through the pages stored in a cache, and retreive the corresponding metadata from localStorage.

It all worked fine, but as soon as I read Remy’s post about the forehead-slappingly brilliant technique he’s using, I knew I’d be switching my code over. Instead of using localStorage—or any other browser API—to store and retrieve metadata, he uses the pages themselves! Using the Cache API, you can examine the contents of the pages you’ve stored, and get at whatever information you need:

I realised I didn’t need to store anything. HTML is the API.

Refactoring the code for my offline page felt good for a couple of reasons. First of all, I was able to remove a dependency—localStorage—and simplify the JavaScript. That always feels good. But the other reason for the warm fuzzies is that I was able to use data instead of metadata.

Many years ago, Cory Doctorow wrote a piece called Metacrap. In it, he enumerates the many issues with metadata—data about data. The source of many problems is when the metadata is stored separately from the data it describes. The data may get updated, without a corresponding update happening to the metadata. Metadata tends to rot because it’s invisible—out of sight and out of mind.

In fact, that’s always been at the heart of one of the core principles behind microformats. Instead of duplicating information—once as data and again as metadata—repurpose the visible data; mark it up so its meta-information is directly attached to the information itself.

So if you have a person’s contact details on a web page, rather than repeating that information somewhere else—in the head of the document, say—you could instead attach some kind of marker to indicate which bits of the visible information are contact details. In the case of microformats, that’s done with class attributes. You can mark up a page that already has your contact information with classes from the h-card microformat.

Here on my website, I’ve marked up my blog posts, articles, and links using the h-entry microformat. These classes explicitly mark up the content to say “this is the title”, “this is the content”, and so on. This makes it easier for other people to repurpose my content. If, for example, I reply to a post on someone else’s website, and ping them with a webmention, they can retrieve my post and know which bit is the title, which bit is the content, and so on.

When I read Remy’s post about using the Cache API to retrieve information directly from cached pages, I knew I wouldn’t have to do much work. Because all of my posts are already marked up with h-entry classes, I could use those hooks to create a nice offline page.

The markup for my offline page looks like this:

<h1>Offline</h1>
<p>Sorry. It looks like the network connection isn’t working right now.</p>
<div id="history">
</div>

I’ll populate that “history” div with information from a cache called “pages” that I’ve created using the Cache API in my service worker.

I’m going to use async/await to do this because there are lots of steps that rely on the completion of the step before. “Open this cache, then get the keys of that cache, then loop through the pages, then…” All of those thens would lead to some serious indentation without async/await.

All async functions have to have a name—no anonymous async functions allowed. I’m calling this one listPages, just like Remy is doing. I’m making the listPages function execute immediately:

(async function listPages() {
...
})();

Now for the code to go inside that immediately-invoked function.

I create an array called browsingHistory that I’ll populate with the data I’ll use for that “history” div.


const browsingHistory = [];


I’m going to be parsing web pages later on, so I’m going to need a DOM parser. I give it the imaginative name of …parser.


const parser = new DOMParser();


Time to open up my “pages” cache. This is the first await statement. When the cache is opened, this promise will resolve and I’ll have access to this cache using the variable …cache (again with the imaginative naming).


const cache = await caches.open('pages');


Now I get the keys of the cache—that’s a list of all the page requests in there. This is the second await. Once the keys have been retrieved, I’ll have a variable that’s got a list of all those pages. You’ll never guess what I’m calling the variable that stores the keys of the cache. That’s right …keys!


const keys = await cache.keys();


Time to get looping. I’m getting each request in the list of keys using a for/of loop:

for (const request of keys) {
...
}

Inside the loop, I pull the page out of the cache using the match() method of the Cache API. I’ll store what I get back in a variable called response. As with everything involving the Cache API, this is asynchronous so I need to use the await keyword here.


const response = await cache.match(request);


I’m not interested in the headers of the response. I’m specifically looking for the HTML itself. I can get at that using the text() method. Again, it’s asynchronous and I want this promise to resolve before doing anything else, so I use the await keyword. When the promise resolves, I’ll have a variable called html that contains the body of the response.


const html = await response.text();


Now I can use that DOM parser I created earlier. I’ve got a string of text in the html variable. I can generate a Document Object Model from that string using the parseFromString() method. This isn’t asynchronous so there’s no need for the await keyword.


const dom = parser.parseFromString(html, 'text/html');


Now I’ve got a DOM, which I have creatively stored in a variable called …dom.

I can poke at it using DOM methods like querySelector. I can test to see if this particular page has an h-entry on it by looking for an element with a class attribute containing the value “h-entry”:

if (dom.querySelector('.h-entry h1.p-name') {
...
}

In this particular case, I’m also checking to see if the h1 element of the page is the title of the h-entry. That’s so that index pages (like my home page) won’t get past this if statement.

Inside the if statement, I’m going to store the data I retrieve from the DOM. I’ll save the data into an object called …data!


const data = new Object;


Well, the first piece of data isn’t actually in the markup: it’s the URL of the page. I can get that from the request variable in my for loop.


data.url = request.url;


I’m going to store the timestamp for this h-entry. I can get that from the datetime attribute of the time element marked up with a class of dt-published.


data.timestamp = new Date(dom.querySelector('.h-entry .dt-published').getAttribute('datetime'));


While I’m at it, I’m going to grab the human-readable date from the innerText property of that same time.dt-published element.


data.published = dom.querySelector('.h-entry .dt-published').innerText;


The title of the h-entry is in the innerText of the element with a class of p-name.


data.title = dom.querySelector('.h-entry .p-name').innerText;


At this point, I am actually going to use some metacrap instead of the visible h-entry content. I don’t output a description of the post anywhere in the body of the page, but I do put it in the head in a meta element. I’ll grab that now.


data.description = dom.querySelector('meta[name="description"]').getAttribute('content');


Alright. I’ve got a URL, a timestamp, a publication date, a title, and a description, all retrieved from the HTML. I’ll stick all of that data into my browsingHistory array.


browsingHistory.push(data);


My if statement and my for/in loop are finished at this point. Here’s how the whole loop looks:

for (const request of keys) {
  const response = await cache.match(request);
  const html = await response.text();
  const dom = parser.parseFromString(html, 'text/html');
  if (dom.querySelector('.h-entry h1.p-name')) {
    const data = new Object;
    data.url = request.url;
    data.timestamp = new Date(dom.querySelector('.h-entry .dt-published').getAttribute('datetime'));
    data.published = dom.querySelector('.h-entry .dt-published').innerText;
    data.title = dom.querySelector('.h-entry .p-name').innerText;
    data.description = dom.querySelector('meta[name="description"]').getAttribute('content');
    browsingHistory.push(data);
  }
}

That’s the data collection part of the code. Now I’m going to take all that yummy information an output it onto the page.

First of all, I want to make sure that the browsingHistory array isn’t empty. There’s no point going any further if it is.

if (browsingHistory.length) {
...
}

Within this if statement, I can do what I want with the data I’ve put into the browsingHistory array.

I’m going to arrange the data by date published. I’m not sure if this is the right thing to do. Maybe it makes more sense to show the pages in the order in which you last visited them. I may end up removing this at some point, but for now, here’s how I sort the browsingHistory array according to the timestamp property of each item within it:

browsingHistory.sort( (a,b) => {
  return b.timestamp - a.timestamp;
});

Now I’m going to concatenate some strings. This is the string of HTML text that will eventually be put into the “history” div. I’m storing the markup in a string called …markup (my imagination knows no bounds).


let markup = '<p>But you still have something to read:</p>';


I’m going to add a chunk of markup for each item of data.

browsingHistory.forEach( data => {
  markup += `
<h2><a href="${ data.url }">${ data.title }</a></h2>
<p>${ data.description }</p>
<p class="meta">${ data.published }</p>
`;
});

With my markup assembled, I can now insert it into the “history” part of my offline page. I’m using the handy insertAdjacentHTML() method to do this.


document.getElementById('history').insertAdjacentHTML('beforeend', markup);


Here’s what my finished JavaScript looks like:

<script>
(async function listPages() {
  const browsingHistory = [];
  const parser = new DOMParser();
  const cache = await caches.open('pages');
  const keys = await cache.keys();
  for (const request of keys) {
    const response = await cache.match(request);
    const html = await response.text();
    const dom = parser.parseFromString(html, 'text/html');
    if (dom.querySelector('.h-entry h1.p-name')) {
      const data = new Object;
      data.url = request.url;
      data.timestamp = new Date(dom.querySelector('.h-entry .dt-published').getAttribute('datetime'));
      data.published = dom.querySelector('.h-entry .dt-published').innerText;
      data.title = dom.querySelector('.h-entry .p-name').innerText;
      data.description = dom.querySelector('meta[name="description"]').getAttribute('content');
      browsingHistory.push(data);
    }
  }
  if (browsingHistory.length) {
    browsingHistory.sort( (a,b) => {
      return b.timestamp - a.timestamp;
    });
    let markup = '<p>But you still have something to read:</p>';
    browsingHistory.forEach( data => {
      markup += `
<h2><a href="${ data.url }">${ data.title }</a></h2>
<p>${ data.description }</p>
<p class="meta">${ data.published }</p>
`;
    });
    document.getElementById('history').insertAdjacentHTML('beforeend', markup);
  }
})();
</script>

I’m pretty happy with that. It’s not too long but it’s still quite readable (I hope). It shows that the Cache API and the h-entry microformat are a match made in heaven.

If you’ve got an offline strategy for your website, and you’re using h-entry to mark up your content, feel free to use that code.

If you don’t have an offline strategy for your website, there’s a book for that.

This was originally published on my own site.