Widgets & ApplicationCache (was: Standards for Web applications on mobile devices: August 2011 updates)

Hi Marcos,

Le samedi 03 septembre 2011 à 22:47 +0200, Marcos Caceres a écrit :
[sorry for the delay in responding]

> Thank you for continuing to keep the document up to date. This document is very helpful.  

Thanks!

> I have request: can you please ungroup Widgets and HTML's
> ApplicationCache? They are conceptually different things and have
> different use cases.

I think they are actually not so different, and share many use cases.

> Widgets are a way to zip up a bunch of HTML, CSS, and JS files that
> constitute an "installable application" (or some such). That is,
> something someone might want to distribute to keep.  

ApplicationCache can be used to group a bunch of HTML, CSS and JS files
that constitue an "installable application" (e.g. the way the iOS safari
browser let you save to your homescreen an offline Web app when an
application cache is present).

> ApplicationCache is cache control thing: it does not "package" a Web
> Application; just makes some resources available from the cache
> (potentially for off-line use). The end user has not control over it
> and the author can shut it off at any point.

The end user *could* have control over it if the user agent let her (the
same way a widget user agent could also automatically remove widgets
that their authors wish to retract). I don't think there is anything
fundamental is the underlying technologies that prevent or facilitate
that particular use case.


> IMO, keeping them together will lead to confusion. The use cases are
> different: a widget can embed content that uses ApplicationCache, as
> well as load in proprietary APIs (e.g., WAC).

Surely a Web-applicationcached app could also load proprietary APIs. And
an application cache could also have a widget as part of its list of
cacheable resources.

>  It can be used for defining other classes of applications and formats
> (e.g., Opera Extensions).

I can also imagine using ApplicationCache to do that.

Widgets and ApplicationCache differ in some ways (e.g. the security
model of widgets is different, widgets currently don't have an origin,
etc), but I still don't see how they would fundamentally address
different use cases.

Dom

Received on Friday, 16 September 2011 12:56:13 UTC