Re: [manifest] Support for Actionable Notifications in the manifest (#347)

@tikurahul This is interesting, Mozilla is discussing some features for Firefox OS which could create similar use cases for marking up actions which an app can carry out.

However, I'm not sure I fully understand why the app manifest is a good place to add metadata for the particular use case you're describing.

My understanding of the Physical Web project is that you should not need an app per "thing", but that things broadcast URLs which allow users to carry out actions on those things. As discussed in the issue you reference https://github.com/google/physical-web/issues/307 a good way to do this might be for a thing to broadcast a URL which returns metadata using a schema describing the thing [1] and actions [2] which can be carried out on that thing. A user agent can then provide a UI to carry out actions on a thing, but you wouldn't want to have to install an app for every thing in order to do that. Therefore I'm not sure the app manifest is the right place for this metadata?

I wonder whether "actionable notifications" are more of a use case for the Web Notifications API? Perhaps you could embed an action [2] in the body of a notification in order to make that notification actionable? Or, a user agent could use its notifications UI to simply display actions discovered for nearby devices to the user, without needing to use the Web Notifications API.

In this case where the interaction doesn't need to happen through an installed app I'm not sure the app manifest is the right place for that metadata, but for other cases where an app wants to register itself as handling a particular type of action when it is installed, I think there are potential use cases that fit the app manifest. For example, a web search app might want to register as handling a "SearchAction", a communications app might want to register as handling a "CommunicateAction" or yes, a smart home app may want to handle a "ControlAction". This is more like the use cases of Web Activites/Web Intents.

1. http://schema.org/Thing
2. http://schema.org/docs/actions.html
3. http://www.w3.org/TR/notifications/
4. http://schema.org/SearchAction
5. http://schema.org/ControlAction
5. http://schema.org/CommunicateAction

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