RE: [manifest] screen sizes, Re: Review of Web Application Manifest Format and Management APIs

Marcos, 

Re "I thought we had stopped the whole designing for particular screen sizes, etc. a long time ago.", that may be the still-closely-held goal, but the reality is that designing for multiple screen sizes (and pixel densities) is still far from simple. Even with all the tools that have been developed in CSS and Media Queries. 

So if developers want to claim that they have focused their design on specific form factors (and presumably tested it thoroughly on them), this seems like a good thing as it allows them to be more certain that their apps won't be distributed to users of devices on which they won't work well (which will negatively impact the developer's reputation, use of the app, appstore etc), or if distributed to such users, will be clearly identified as not being designed for those devices.

Like many of the things we wanted to do in widget manifest structures in BONDI and WAC, if these get pulled from the plan the only fallback is developer ecosystem-specific app metadata, which in the end evaporates with the developer ecosystems, or never achieves widespread use or interoperability. So the problem is not solved for developers by leaving these things out of standards, where there is a strong use case.

Thanks,
Bryan Sullivan 

-----Original Message-----
From: Marcos Caceres [mailto:w3c@marcosc.com] 
Sent: Friday, May 25, 2012 7:43 AM
To: Anant Narayanan
Cc: public-webapps@w3.org
Subject: [manifest] screen sizes, Re: Review of Web Application Manifest Format and Management APIs




On Sunday, May 13, 2012 at 5:47 PM, Anant Narayanan wrote:

> > > screen_size: This object may contain the min_height and min_width properties that describe the minimum height and width (in pixels) the application needs in order to render correctly. Interpretation of these values is left up to the runtime and/or app store.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > How does this play with CSS and media queries in particular? What's the use case?
> 
> These values do not interfere with runtime detection via media queries.
> The use case for these values is two-fold:
> - An app store may prevent the user from installing an app on a device
> which doesn't meet this criteria
> - A UA may prevent the user from launching an app on a device which
> doesn't meet this criteria
> 
> The primary goal in both cases is to let the developer declare what
> screen sizes their app is known to work correctly.

The above cases seems very "anti-web" IMHO. I thought we had stopped the whole designing for particular screen sizes, etc. a long time ago. I feel it would be a shame to codify this in a spec.

-- 
Marcos Caceres

Received on Friday, 25 May 2012 15:37:04 UTC