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

@dmurph wrote:
>> Digital signage - Similar to the above, I'm currently working on a use case in digital signage where I'd like to be able to remotely install a web app to a kiosk runtime, which doesn't have its own user agent UI to install a web app. The kiosk runtime runs a single web app at a time full screen. It's quite common in digital signage to remotely provision APKs to an Android runtime, but the same is not currently possible with web apps.

> Do you mind expanding on this? 

Basically I have a [kiosk runtime](https://github.com/krellian/kiosk) which acts as a kind of remote control web browser. It hosts a web interface (and [WoT API](https://webthings.io/api/)) into which you can enter a URL to tell the kiosk to load that web page on its screen and act as a digital sign. In addition to just loading a web page I'd like to be able to remotely install a web app to the kiosk, including installing a service worker so that content can be cached for offline use in the case of network outages. The kiosk can also be interactive, so the runtime may want to restrict users to the navigation scope of the installed app. The kiosk runtime does not have a user interface for navigating to and installing web apps itself, that functionality is only provided remotely via a separate UI which doesn't have access to documents inside the browsing context. Ideally I would like to be able to remotely install a web app onto the kiosk from that UI using its manifest URL.

> Would web packaging solve this use case?  I could see us sending a web package to the kiosk as an option here too.

I'm not sure, I'm afraid I've lost track of the latest attempts to bring packaging to the web since packaged apps were such a disaster for Firefox OS. But ideally I'd like to be able to just give the kiosk any manifest URL and have it pull down a PWA itself.

> I can also see the above policy-install functionality work too (more round-about, yes, but it works)

I agree it could be possible to implement a workaround for this use case using another approach, but it would be much more complicated and unreliable to have to download and parse HTML files in order to extract manifest link relations and find manifest URLs (I'd rather leave the tricky task of parsing HTML to the browser engine, rather than my application).

> I think the main other issue with manifest_url = global_id is that you are STUCK with the url

I understand why this might be tricky in some production environments, but I personally happen to think it's a [good thing](https://www.w3.org/Provider/Style/URI).

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