Re: [w3c/manifest] Deep linking - need proper use cases and requirements analysis (#363)

I had a look over Balista (which looks great BTW), but I don't think that's the same thing as deep linking.

Deep linking is about enabling hyperlinks for installed web apps, a fundamental feature of the web. It's about users being able to follow a hyperlink to a URL which falls within the URL scope covered by the manifest, other than the start_url, and for the manifest to be applied.

We have an implementation of deep linking using W3C Web Manifests in Firefox OS 2.5 so I can help provide use cases.

An example would be:

http://foo.com/myapp/manifest.webmanifest:
```
{
 " name": "my app",
  "start_url": "/myapp/index.html",
  "scope": "/myapp",
  "display": "standalone"
}
```

http://bar.com/page.html:
`<a href="http://foo.com/myapp/deep.html">deep link</a>`

Clicking the hyperlink in page.html would navigate to deep.html and result in a browsing context with the manifest applied, so in this case it would have the standalone display mode.

A use case might be clicking on a link to a Facebook page from another website and that Facebook page opening in the installed Facebook web app, or following a link to a news article inside an installed news web app.

In Firefox OS we dynamically apply the manifest to the current browsing context when it is navigated to a URL within the scope of a "pinned" web app. I'm not sure what the UI for this should look like in other implementations like Chrome/Opera on Android where there is more of a distinction between app windows and browser tabs.

Balista is different to deep linking because it doesn't use a hyperlink directly to a URL, there's a layer of indirection where it requests an "action" which could be handled by one of many web apps, of which the source app need have no knowledge. I have taken the liberty of filing a separate issue #442 for that.

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Received on Thursday, 31 March 2016 09:37:14 UTC