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

Perhaps this particular issue then (the need to convey information about intended usage of an app, or preferred device characteristics), especially designing for a diverse set of devices and screen characteristics (mobile phones up to building-side billboards), should be something that we encourage developer input on through the community group process. My sense is that it's a bigger problem than it seems, and that by just saying "apps should work on any device" or "apps should not be tailored to specific device characteristics" thus we don't need such metadata in manifests, we are doing developers a disservice. It's much more complicated than that, and I believe developers *do* commonly focus on particular device segments when designing Webapps.

Thanks,
Bryan Sullivan 

-----Original Message-----
From: Scott Wilson [mailto:scott.bradley.wilson@gmail.com] 
Sent: Friday, May 25, 2012 12:59 PM
To: Marcos Caceres
Cc: SULLIVAN, BRYAN L; Anant Narayanan; public-webapps WG; public-webappstore@w3.org
Subject: Re: [manifest] screen sizes, Re: Review of Web Application Manifest Format and Management APIs

On 25 May 2012, at 17:25, Marcos Caceres wrote:

> 
> 
> On Friday, May 25, 2012 at 4:34 PM, SULLIVAN, BRYAN L wrote:
> 
>> 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.

I think there is a problem here that we can get very mobile and tablet focussed - some of our widgets are also designed with interactive whiteboards and TVs in mind which may throw off selections based on things like screen size and pixel density. 

I can see users ending up doing the whole "spoof the user-agent string" again here, as when sites started showing "your browser is not supported" when you viewed them with something the developer hadn't considered. 

Perhaps at the store level it would be nice to have some assertions of platforms tested by the developer, but that would be something different really (perhaps something for the web app stores CG to look at).

>> 
>> 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.
>> 
> 
> Still sounds to me like "Made for <insert everyone's favorite 90's browser here>, and best viewed at 800x600" ... and look how well that turned out. Even if we don't focus on mobile devices, it seems like a silly requirement as I can just adjust my browser window to whatever size I want (there is no reason to believe I won't be able to do that on future mobile devices). I.e., screen size and application display area are not the same thing and this metadata attribute seems to assume so.    
> 
> --  
> Marcos Caceres
> 
> 
> 
>

Received on Saturday, 26 May 2012 00:50:47 UTC