Someone recently directed me to the W3C spec on widgets:
Developers can make web apps work offline via a browser's application cache. I had asked how users were supposed to know they could use certain websites offline, which is when the the person brought up the widget spec. It makes sense to split the packaging of an app apart from its offline storage ability. However, after googling around and reading up on widgets, I couldn't find any recent articles on the subject (most articles seemed to be from around 2010). Eventually I found Opera's SDK, but there was a message at the beginning indicating that they were removing the functionality:
Starting with Opera 12, Opera Widgets will be turned off for new users and completely removed in a later release.
source: http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/creating-your-first-opera-widget/
Are W3C widgets a dead technology? And if so, is there any cross-browser technology being developed for the packaging of web apps? I'm curious because I think offline storage is interesting, but don't see how users would know that even when they don't have an internet connection, they could browse to a particular URL and have it work, unless the browser told them which apps they had installed (or unless every site that supported offline storage explained it to them).
