Re: [manifest] Add meta tags equivs. for features were possible (#350)

@benfrancis, sure, web pages and webapps are different (and sometimes it's fuzzy and complicated), but it doesn't matter here! It's a red herring. 

[The use cases](https://w3c-webmob.github.io/installable-webapps/) work just fine without caring about this distinction. We know this for a fact, because such metatags are already successful and in widespread use, but with an `apple-` prefix.

I completely disagree with you about bandwidth being a problem. I think there are key things that must be considered:

1. This proposal doesn't take away ability to use external manifest file.
    In every situation where metatags wouldn't be suitable one can use an external manifest file instead, so nobody is worse off.

2. Metatags are an overhead only if HTML is reloaded, but webapps (almost by definition) do that very rarely.
   Extensive use of DHTML, AJAX and/or some form of offline storage is pretty much expected from webapps that are going to be installed among native apps.

3. Your example gzips to 175 bytes. When it's compressed with other markup, **it only adds 78 bytes** to the page. Even in the very constrained case of optimizing for rendering in the initial 14KB TCP window, with HTTPS overhead, that's still 1% cost.
   External CSS and JS matter only because they're literally *thousands times larger* than this. It seems wrong to always require use of optimizations designed for large files on manifest data that can be so tiny.


---
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/w3c/manifest/issues/350#issuecomment-91726184