§12. Offline Editing Without a Deliberate Checkout

Distinct from a deliberate vacation/USB checkout (§7) or a deliberate borrow (§11): a resource's owning storage can become wholly unreachable (the whole box goes down, not just its node process) with no prior checkout having been made. In this case, the cached entry should remain editable for per-user state while disconnected.

v1 scope (per §7): the writable-cache here is a per-user-state-writable cache, not a fully-writable one. While the resource is unreachable, the user can still edit their own notes/progress/bookmarks/borrow records, but resource metadata and screenshots (§4.6) are read-only until the authoritative copy is reachable again. This deliberately narrows the earlier framing ("remain editable, including its images"): in v1, images-as-screenshots are part of resource metadata and are not offline-editable; only per-user state is. This is what makes §7's single-writer metadata guarantee hold without a merge tool.

The per-user-state edits accumulate locally against the last-known base and reconcile using the same rules as any other case once the resource is reachable — generalized, per §7, to handle more than one independent edit source reconciling in sequence (e.g. two different boxes each editing their own per-user state while the source was down, reconciling one after the other once it returns — the second reconciliation merges against a state that already includes the first).

If offline metadata editing is enabled in a future version (§7's future hook), that is when the merge/diff tool and the multi-writer metadata reconciliation become necessary — they are explicitly out of scope for v1 precisely because v1 forbids the edits that would require them.