Re: [w3c/manifest] Specification status report for TPAC 2019 (#782)

@mgiuca, @dominickng, would be great to hear your perspectives also...  

> What progress has your spec made in the last 12 months?

Limited. We are mostly waiting on implementation feedback.

Mozilla implemented the manifest processor around six years ago but it's only now making its way into products: namely Firefox Preview on Android. As part of that effort, we identified some non-blocking issues with icon's purpose (fixed), and also with CSS color parsing. Mozilla is hoping to provide further feedback as we gain implementation experience and put this out into products and and in front of real people.

The Manifest spec is also shipping in Safari, and we'd really like to get more feedback from Apple about their experience.

> Is anything blocking your spec from moving to CR?

Yes. Because the spec lacks any programmatic means to install a webapp, it makes the spec notoriously difficult to test: basically, we need to do a bunch of manual testing.

There is also some disagreement on the a `BeforeInstallPrompt()` event (BIP). Despite BIP having been in the spec for a few years, neither Safari nor Firefox have opted to support it. As it stands, Mozilla does not plan to support BIP. We are unsure what WebKit's plans are - @hober maybe could let us know? If WebKit doesn't plan to support it, then we should probably remove it from the spec.

We also made a mistake trying to use WebIDL to model the data structures of Web Manifest. Although it seemed like a good idea at the time, this turns out to not work well in practice: no implementation does processing of Web Manifest data through the a Web IDL binding layer. Some work is underway to change the spec to use Infra types instead.

There is also a proposal to add "shortcuts" to icons #768 from @aarongustafson, but lacks implementation interest from a second engine. We might need to move to incubation? 

> If yes, what is your plan to unblock it and do you need any help?

To unblock, we might need to make some hard choices about BIP and new feature proposals. We should try to get agreement on a limited number of things (i.e., maybe 3) to work on over then next year.

> What do you want to achieve for your spec in the next two days (of breakout sessions)?

Decide what's in scope, and what is not. Hopefully hear from @hober or other folks from WebKit about what they would like to see in the spec. At this point, Mozilla is happy with the base set of manifest members. 


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