Re: coremob-ISSUE-8: No spec to point to for Full-screen mode. [COREMOB-1]

On 19 Jun 2012, at 17:34, Tobie Langel wrote:

> 
> 
> On 6/19/12 6:31 PM, "Scott Wilson" <scott.bradley.wilson@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On 19 Jun 2012, at 10:36, Robin Berjon wrote:
>> 
>>> On Jun 19, 2012, at 11:11 , Charles McCathieNevile wrote:
>>>> On Tue, 19 Jun 2012 10:32:07 +0200, Tobie Langel <tobie@fb.com> wrote:
>>>>> You referring to [Fullscreen], I suppose. I should rename this
>>>>> feature to
>>>>> chromeless to avoid confusion (although that might create another
>>>>> kind of
>>>>> confusion).
>>>> 
>>>> Ah. Something like widgets?
>>> 
>>> It depends on how widgets are implemented :) There's nothing that says
>>> that widgets have to run chromeless (though they usually do).
>>> 
>>>> (I saw another implementation of widgets last week running in a SMIL
>>>> player on top of a webkit browser. I wonder how many there really are,
>>>> and have been).
>>> 
>>> Widgets are easy to implement. I wonder how many have been security
>>> audited though ‹ it's easy to get things rather wrong.
>>> 
>>>>> Here, what we're interested in is an API that lets us advise the UA
>>>>> upfront we'd rather run without any browser chrome, similar to
>>>>> [view-mode]'s fullscreen mode or Apple's
>>>>> [apple-mobile-web-app-capable]
>>>>> meta tag.
>>>> 
>>>> OK, sorry for being confused.
>>> 
>>> Actually, we have to think a little bit beyond this being equal to
>>> view-mode=fullscreen. On (most) mobile devices, since every application
>>> is always full screen, when you remove the chrome you get a full screen
>>> application. But on anything that has an windowing system, there's a
>>> difference. I think that what's wanted here is view-mode=chromeless,
>>> which in a windowed environment would give you an app without chrome but
>>> not necessarily occupying the entire screen.

Isn't that a good fit for viewmode:floating from VMMF?

"Describes a Web application providing a more immersive interface, running in a windowed manner but without chrome, and with the viewport's initial background being transparent such that other system items (other applications, the display's background...) can be seen through parts of the viewport that are not being painted to."

For smaller devices, or those with no concept of windowing, a viewmode preference of "floating" could fallback to "fullscreen".

>>> And, of course, a way of
>>> requesting that a given view-mode be activated.

There have been a few times I'd have liked this, but I think the method of letting the user and UA control the viewmode and have the content adapt seems more appropriate. If apps did have the ability to request a viewmode change is fairly likely to be suboptimal, as the app developer likely has a preconceived notion of the type of device and capabilities its running on, which may conflict with the preferences of the user.

>>> 
>>>>> I feel like a declarative API would be better for this.
>>>> 
>>>> So being able to request a view-mode? That's in the widgets P&C
>>>> although it sounds like there is a goal to seperate config from
>>>> packaging and be able to use live web content. That has been expressed
>>>> before (and is the conceptual difference between widgets on the one
>>>> hand appcache and the proposed JSON packaging manifest offers on the
>>>> other, the rest being a matter of syntax and implementation quality)

>>>> 
>>>> The place for that might be the native-web-apps community group.
>>> 
>>> Why could this not be an additional view-mode, which could be included
>>> in the application configuration that WebApps is working on?
>> 
>> Is that VMMF or something else? I see VMMF just went to REC.
> 
> Yes. And it indeed just did.
> 
> --tobie
>