Re: [w3c/manifest] Add a unique identifier for a PWA (#586)

I see the following issues with using manifest url:
1) This locks developers into a CDN / the manifest url host. I can see a world where someone scraping manifests would see a ton of duplicate webapps here because they find links to lots of different manifest urls for the same app (versioned, or on different CDNs). There would all be separate apps
2) This prevents versioning of the manifest in the name
3) This makes it difficult to serve different manifests based on client hints like language, etc.

I think not having a developer-facing / obvious ID system also has some problems:
1) Sites accidentally break webapp updating by changing start_url or manifest_url w/o knowing that none of their old users won't get updated. This segments their users and there is no way to fix it.
2) Without a standard here different user agents do different things (chrome uses start_url, Android uses manifest_url, Firefox uses manifest_url?)
3) Hard to have two different webapps on the same origin that works for multiple user agents

We have already seen major sites break their webapp by changing the start_url or manifest_url without knowing that this breaks things.


So in general, I think this is really important to fix. I think manifest_url as the key is "ok", but I'd much rather allow the manifest_url to change for a webapp to avoid the issues up top (do you see any other issues?)

I'm thinking maybe we can use a unique-per-origin ID that a manifest can set. It can be a string of anything, and the default value could match either start_url or manifest url to prevent breaking on one system or another (someone is going to break).

WDYT?

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