What it means
An installable site needs three things: a manifest that names it, a service worker that keeps pages on the device, and a page to show when a page is not there. In loam nobody builds or maintains them — the engine derives all three from what the site already says about itself.
How loam does it
- The manifest.
/manifest.jsoncomes from the organisation's name, the site icon and the theme colours. - The service worker.
/sw.jskeeps what a visitor opened and, once a day, walks the sitemap to keep the rest. Pages come from the network first and fall back to the copy; versioned assets stay until they change; forms are never touched. - Offline and install pages.
/offlinerenders when everything else is gone;/installexplains per browser how to add the site. A theme can take over either page. - Engine-owned where it matters. The manifest and the worker have no theme layer: one wrong line in either breaks the install on every device. What a site shapes is the data they are made from.
A site on the home screen that opens without a loading bar and works in a tunnel — without a store, a review, a second codebase or an update cycle. Change the site and the app follows.
What it costs
The worker caches, so a visitor may see a page a moment older than the live one before the refresh lands — with a connection the live page wins. And it is a web app, not a native one: no push notifications, no camera, no app store. That trade is deliberate.