Re: [manifest] Native API Permissions (#319)

On March 6, 2015 at 11:34:28 PM, Ben Francis (notifications@github.com) wrote:
> Yes that matches my interpretation.
>  
> A web app is a collection of web pages dedicated to a particular task. You can discover  
> new web apps through the web browser, and when you find something you want to keep you can  
> "install"/"pin" it to your device to break it out of the browser and use it standalone.  

Or reopen it in the browser :) It's just fancy bookmarking. 

> Some people think that a web app installed to your device should be able to get access to  
> features of the device that it otherwise couldn't when you're just "browsing" it.

Yes, that's something that has come up in various contexts - though I don't think anyone has gone as far as to actually enable any such thing. 

> In order to grant permissions to a web app we also need to agree on the identity of a web app  
> (see #272) so we know what we're granting permissions to. I still think the manifest URL  
> is the best identifier (I know I haven't convinced Marcos of this yet). 

It doesn't work, for the reasons mentioned in #272 (many to many relationship). AFAICT, it's an implementation detail (see iOS, for instance, where each app has it's own identity - and get's system-level permission integration - and Android, where it shares cookies ... and FxOS, where it does the more or less the same as iOS).   

> The manifest describes  
> the URL scope of the app in the scope property, so that you know which resources you're  
> granting permissions to.

Yep. 

> A permissions property could describe the maximum permissions an installed app can  
> request, and perhaps even some permissions which are implicitly granted by simply installing  
> the app. (We kind of already do this in a way, the standalone display mode allows an installed  
> web app to hide the URL bar, which it couldn't do in the browser).

Well, you can via `requestFullscreen()`, for instance. And iOS experimented with `minimal-ui; Though the way they implemented that was problematic, so they backed it out.  Also, IE in windows 8 generally runs apps with a minimal UI. Again, it's very quite specific to the OS's conventions. 





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