blog post

Hi all,

As some of you may have seen, I've posted a the blog entry I was
alluding to yesterday:
http://www.w3.org/QA/2013/03/closing_the_gap_with_native_ap.html

Quoting the parts that reflect some of my more direct thinking in this
space:
         Some of the barriers that I've heard mentioned frequently
        include:
        
            performance, in particular when it comes to user interfaces
        (e.g. scrolling), as it can affect the user experience
        dramatically; a whole headlight project is actually dedicated to
        the topic;
        
            discovery: how can developers expose their Web apps to their
        potential users? How can users rate and review Web apps? What is
        the right equivalent of application stores for the Web? How
        centralized would it be? How does it relate to search engine?
        How can we make it possible to discover context relevant Web
        apps?
        
            developer tools: when native SDKs come with full-fledged
        IDEs, debuggers, profilers, the experience for Web apps
        developers remain ad-hoc in the best cases; are there systematic
        problems in our technologies that have made it hard to build
        good developers tools? how much of a barrier is the design
        inconsistency among our technologies that the Web legacy
        requires us to keep around?
        
            capabilities (e.g. hardware integration): we have already a
        lot of ongoing work in this space, but are there items that are
        so important we should dedicate a lot more resources in getting
        them done faster? Should we boost the efforts such as what the
        CoreMob Community Group has been doing to get greater
        convergence among implementors on a smaller set of features?
        
        Some of the probably under-used strengths of the Web as a
        platform would be:
            users don't need to install Web apps, removing the need to
        "garden our phones" (as I heard Scott Jenson eloquently put it),
        and thus enabling use cases that are out of reach for native
        apps;
        
            the Web is pretty much the only contender when it comes to
        create apps that run in any connected device, and maybe more
        futuristically, that break the device barriers completely (e.g.
        in so called multi-screens scenarios).
        
        Part of the difficulty of this problem is that addressing these
        barriers, and taking advantage of these strengths depends on
        whether we're talking of Web apps inside the browser context
        (with its specific security contraints), Web-based native apps
        (as defined by the W3C System Applications Working Group), or
        even hybrid apps.
        
I would be interested in feedback; and as a reminder, it would be great
to get intros and perspectives from everybody who has signed up so
far :)

Dom

Received on Wednesday, 6 March 2013 17:20:28 UTC