Re: [w3c/manifest] Clarify the definition of "navigation scope", "applied", and off-scope theming (#880)

Hey @benfrancis 

> OK, that makes sense. It was not clear to me from the specification and proposed text that app-to-app deep linking would be possible though. Do you think this could be made more explicit?

Sure. Maybe we can tackle it as part of the #764 work. (Or, if you feel like it, feel free to put up a PR suggesting stronger wording for deep linking. FYI that section is very old and I don't think it's been touched since I've been an editor on the Manifest.)

> I agree that is how Android and iOS work. But I would argue this is the result of trying to shoehorn the web into the native app model of existing mobile operating systems, not necessarily the optimal design for web applications which would work to the strengths of the web.
> 
> I think we may have to agree to disagree that the optimal behaviour is for every installed web application to act as a mini browser that can be navigated to any URL on the web, and that by default a link only ever goes from browser to app or app to app, and never app to browser. But I concede that in order to move towards a Candidate Recommendation, describing the current behaviour of implementations is the most pragmatic and low-friction way forward.

OK. As I've said above, at a personal level, I agree with you wholeheartedly. I do not like it when apps keep you inside their frame when you're off browsing the web, and I turn it off for every app that I can. There's a reason we have full-featured web browser apps! However, I must note the reality that the web platform is in competition to native apps platforms, and that gives developers a certain amount of sway over us... they overwhelmingly want to keep users inside their app frames by default (so that the user can get back to their app with one tap), and so it behooves us as platform designers to accomodate that, in the way that best respects the user (i.e., giving the user controls to grab the URL and re-open the page in a web browser, for instance). If we don't do that, we'll find sites building their own browser UI in an iframe instead, which makes it much harder for us to intervene on the part of the user. So that's why I'm cautiously supportive of this "navigation off scope from within the app" behaviour. (And there are other, much more legitimate use cases, such as the authentication-on-another-origin case.)

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