Re: Fixing appcache: a proposal to get us started

On Mon, Apr 8, 2013 at 12:17 AM, Mark Nottingham <mnot@mnot.net> wrote:
> Hi Jonas,
>
> I don't get a good sense from this proposal (and NavigationController) about what the scope of an application is. E.g., if both
>   http://example.com/fooApp
> and
>   http://example.com/barApp
> say that they both grab the URL
>   http://example.com/app
> who wins?
>
> More to the point, what's stopping
>   http://users.example.edu/~bob/
> from taking over responses from
>   http://users.example.edu/~alice/
> ?
>
> Also along these lines - I see an outstanding question that some people want to host multiple apps on the same URL. Is that really wise?
>
> If anything, I'd go the other way and say that one hostname = one app; then the scoping of and separation between apps is intuitive (e.g., fooApp.example.com, barApp.example.com). You could even define a well-known location for the manifest, so that people could just type the hostname in to install / view the app...

This is, unfortunately, a great point.

The current AppCache spec suffers from this too, but only once users
go offline. I.e. I can use FALLBACK to take over
http://users.example.edu/~alice/ using a resource from from
http://users.example.edu/~bob/newalice.html

But that only works when the user is offline, which limits the damage a little.

The only solution that I can see to this problem is requiring that
manifests, or navigationcontroller-scripts are only allowed to "take
over" URLs that are "below" them. I.e.
http://users.example.edu/~bob/manifest.json could only control
navigations to URLs with the prefix "http://users.example.edu/~bob/".
You could still redirect resource loading in more flexible ways, but
maybe top-level page loads needs to have this restriction.

/ Jonas

Received on Wednesday, 1 May 2013 04:21:22 UTC