Gmail users now can attach files to messages with the offline version of Google's Web-based e-mail service.
It's no paradigm-shifting change by itself, to be sure, but it is one more step in Google's overall effort to make Gmail--one of its premiere Web applications--as robust as PC-based competition such as Microsoft Outlook.
It's also a sign that the company hasn't lost interest in the general technology. Google added offline features to Gmail and to some parts of Google Docs and Google Calendar, but has been proceeding at something of a stately pace in spreading the technology.
Google uses software it developed called Gears to provide the offline support, but the HTML standard used to describe Web sites is getting its own support in the HTML5 specification under development now. Google has begun the process of building that feature, called local storage, into its Chrome browser.
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