Google Gears, cache the world
Google Gears makes sense on paper, but I need to see how well it actually works with non-static pages. This is exactly the idea I toyed around a little about a year ago. I think I emailed google to request an offline feature for gmail, by which I meant an intermediate layer that simulates API calls to the real server and then do sync after reconnection. Nothing as grand as Gears, but same ideas. The difference, of course, is that you might be able to do this by simulating a specific web app API set, but I don’t see a way to solve all the world’s problems.
Static HTML, sure, any browser can do that. The hype is that it will make gMail and other things work offline, and the news stories sound like this can be done by an army of volunteer programmers. I don’t think that’s the intent of Google.