Re: “Closing the gap with native” headlight project

On 07/03/2013 10:38 , Dominique Hazael-Massieux wrote:
> Le jeudi 14 février 2013 à 20:13 -0800, Jonas Sicking a écrit :
>> Some areas that I think are in great need are:
>>
>> * Offline support
>
> I wholeheartedly agree that our offer in this space is currently rather
> poor; my understanding is that there is solid work proposed to replace
> AppCache that should hopefully land in WebApps soon.
>
> The other issue that many developers face is how to deal with the
> limitations in storage space; there is work on the Quota API that is
> meant to address this issue.

I can confirm that there is a very good (IMHO) upcoming proposal, and 
based on the discussions that we had we are probably headed in a 
direction where it will integrate well with quota support. The basic 
idea that we mentioned was that a website can go straight to offline 
(i.e. without prompting) but that is to temporary storage. If it has 
some form of installation affordance and the user activates it, then 
that makes that storage permanent. Permanent storage has natural ties to 
quota (if only with increased by-default storage).

> With all that, do you believe that there are additional steps that need
> to be taken in this space? And more specifically, are there additional
> resources that W3C ought to invest in here, either to address additional
> use cases, or to accelerate the work on these existing use case?

Well, it's been a little while since we had the meeting that put 
together the ideas for the new model, but the output still hasn't been 
made public. I don't know if that's due to lack of bandwidth or if it's 
a matter of sending someone with a plyer to remove nails until something 
happens.

>> * Network performance. Websites end up both creating redundant
>> connections as well as download redundant data currently.
>
> There were some new discussions on this topic in DAP recently, with
> Tobie proposing for instance that offering developers a way to schedule
> large background download of data (which browsers could optimize based
> on the network environment) would help, as well as other ideas:
> http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-device-apis/2013Feb/0058.html

To reinforce a point that may be a little bit buried in Tobie's email: 
background upload is particularly important here. The classic use case 
is: open app -> do something that needs to be uploaded once done (e.g. 
snap a pic) -> close app. You don't want the last step there to 
interrupt the upload (and you want a notification at the end of it, 
probably the cancellation of a previous notification too).

This is probably something for which we could come up with a simple API. 
One question I have is whether we'd want this tied to forms as well 
(e.g. in case we're looking at a form upload).

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Thursday, 7 March 2013 13:42:39 UTC