Re: [w3ctag/spec-reviews] Progressive Web Apps (#123)

> It's a design strategy, that is supported by underlying standards. The ability to feature-detect, de-sugar, and polyfill are critical, architecturally, to "progressiveness"

That sounds like one reasonable opinion. Objectively there is disagreement about what progressiveness means.  At some level, who cares.  Let's just say it's a marketing term and it means what you want it to mean in the context in which you use it!

> >  The additional element PWAs bring is to say that all sites should be PWAs and all PWAs should be standalone/fullscreen.

> I would argue this is not true at all - and it's just an accident of history

Currently, the community Lighthouse validator will fail any candidate PWA that does not declare standalone or fullscreen in its manifest display property. So what I am saying is true, I believe, in relation to Google's definition of PWAs.

In reality whether or not an app passes a particular ruleset offered by a validator doesn't matter unless those rules are being enforced with some kind of carrot (eg an install prompt) or stick (eg deranking in search).  If a popular browser refuses to pop an install prompt unless the app is standalone, then all apps will be standalone, regardless of whether that is appropriate for their use case, regardless of what the default in the spec is.  That's how developer incentives work.  The history of the web is littered with examples of how developers and browsers are influenced by each other's behaviour, not by what the spec says.

So I'm not sure where that leaves us in terms of commenting on architectural issues, because I guess we are mostly talking about vendor-specific behaviours that are not the subject of specs - and Google, Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft are looking at different heuristics and rules for their respective install prompts.  What may well shake out here is that the practical definition of a PWA is the union of all the rules and heuristics that each vendor comes up with to earn an install prompt in their browser.

Since I can't find any solid ground for an architecture discussion here I'm happy to close this.

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