[w3c/manifest] Developer information? (#1001)

Hi,

Rakuten has started to add support for third-party merchant websites in its mobile payment application, based on PWA. The catalogue of web apps you can "install" and use in our "super app" thus gets all the app's metadata from its web manifest.

When a user launches a 3rd-party app the first time, a dialog is show to present some information about it: name of the developer with an optional URL, as well as links to the app's privacy policy, terms of use and support site. This information is also available from the web view menu once the web app is opened.

Although a few [schemas](https://schema.org/) could be used, for instance _[Organization](https://schema.org/Organization)_ or _[Service](https://schema.org/Service)_, they are quite complex. Moreover, JSON-LD seems out of place in a manifest, and the schemas too obscure for us to expect them be used in merchants' web apps either.

Our current implementation thus takes inspiration from [Kai OS webapp manifest](https://developer.kaiostech.com/docs/getting-started/main-concepts/manifest), which feels more "idiomatic":

> ### `"developer"`
> 
> > - **Type:** `Object`
> > - **Mandatory:** No
> 
> Developer information. Use this to provide information about your company and your service to end-users. The recognized keys are show below, and most are optional.
> 
> | Key                    | Description
> | ---------------------- | ---------------------
> | `name` (Mandatory)     | If you provide a `developer` object, it must at least contain the name of your company.
> | `url`                  | Absolute URL of your company's main website (optional).
> | `privacy_policy_url`   | Absolute URL of the page detailing your company's privacy policy (optional).
> | `terms_of_service_url` | Absolute URL of the page detailing your service's terms and conditions (optional).
> | `support_url`          | Absolute URL of a page with methods for end-users to contact you for support (optional).

Although our user agent is a super app, we think this metadata would also have value in a web manifest for web browsers. Without this, discovering the information relies on parsing the HTML DOM and looking for many complex schemas with a lot of fragmentation, with no easily predicable behavior.

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Received on Wednesday, 8 September 2021 00:36:46 UTC