I have a web page that starts with
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html manifest="app.appcache">
and then has a tiny body, consisting just of a link to the rest of the application. I had a meta refresh, but took that out while trying to debug, in case there was an interaction.
In the debugger, Chrome (version 43) shows no attempt to retrieve the app.appcache file, when I click the link it goes on to the application, but there is nothing in the appcache, according to the debugger's Resources tab.
Is there something wrong with my syntax? Something I have to turn on special for Chrome? In Firefox, the application works, the manifest is loaded, the data files are cached into the application cache, and the meta refresh takes me automatically to the application page. (I do it this way, because the same application code can be used with different collections of data to produce different applications... the starting point does the selection of which application.
I just tested with IE 11 and at least it loads the manifest file. I don't know how to tell if it is downloading the rest of the files in the background, but after a while, I disabled the network adapter, and not all the files were there yet, so I don't know whether it was using the appcache, or just the regular cache to reload the start page of the application. As soon as I turned the network adapter back on, though, IE loaded the missing audio file I was trying to listen to.
Opera seems to behave the same as Chrome, apparently that is part of the code they share.
EDIT:
I learned some more... I set up a tiny test case, less than a dozen files, and (1) the manifest file was not reported in the Network tab activity for reloading the page (2) neither were the files loaded because the manifest file existed shown in the Network tab activity (3) The caching actually did happen, and a list of files showed up in the Application Cache section of the Resources tab. But, with my much bigger application, the Application Cache section just shows "Checking" status, with no file list, and no network activity. For hours.