More on the WebOS
A while back, Kottke wrote an article making web-based apps work even when a user is disconnected from the network. I thought that it'd be a lot easier to get more net connectivity than it would be to make online apps work offline. However, Kottke has several good reasons for believing that offline is still important. I think his best point is that as we move more to online apps, our tolerance for disconnection will decrease.
Ok, so let's assume we want to build this offline web app support infrastructure. What's the minimum that a client machine has to provide to make it possible? I'm thinking just storage. Let's put a thing that looks like a web cache between a user's browser and the network. A web app can query for and then signal to the cache to ask it to pre-fetch, store, and retrieve records. Apps would also need to put a lot more application logic into the piece of the app that runs on the browser. I'm going to need to do some research on javascript/AJAX/etc. to figure out just how much pain this would be.