Re: Comparison between Mozilla & Chrome App Manifests

On 22 Dec 2011, at 00:34, Michiel de Jong wrote:

> Hi!
> 
> CC Ben, it's posts like yours that constitute the hope of the open web. A truly great initiative!
> 
> Everybody else who reads this, let's put our weight behind Ben, and help him with this. Let's team together with mozilla, google and w3c, and be one web with one manifest format. Please read this thread as a starting point:
> 
> http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla-labs/browse_thread/thread/29d186bd2f3580e4
> 
> If the json scares you, just imagine the xml syntax with your mind. I'm not joking, it really is what I do the other way around when i read xml, and it really helps to bridge gaps between the author of a spec and you as a reader. Even if this group will use xml, then we can still make sure there is a one-to-one mapping with the json manifests used by mozilla and google. (see xrd and jrd, or linked data and json-ld, for examples of such mappings). Marcos already hinted at this possibility in one of his blog posts.
> 

It makes sense for an author to create a manifest in XML (W3C Widgets: C&P) using any editor, and for a user agent to generate JSON for it if it has an API. E.g. Apache Wookie consumes W3C Widgets, but exposes various REST APIs that provide the metadata in XML, Atom, and JSON formats.

See also:

http://www.brucelawson.co.uk/2011/installable-web-apps-and-interoperability/

also:

http://scottbw.wordpress.com/2011/02/17/converting-chrome-installed-web-apps-into-w3c-widgets/

> Let's do it! Let's join forces and be 'the one web'.

We keep trying :-) 

I think Mozilla had in mind self-hosted-apps (similar to Facebook apps) rather than a portable/mobile/desktop type of model, which is perhaps why they went off in a different direction - although they ended up with very similar manifest content to W3C. In which case its less important to make the manifest easy to author in a text editor (for example), as the app is principally server-side rather than client-side anyway.

> Cheers,
> Michiel