Re: New manifest spec - ready for FPWD?

On Thu, Nov 28, 2013, at 9:32, Jonathan Bond-Caron wrote:
> On Wed Nov 27 09:20 AM, Mounir Lamouri wrote:
> > On Wed, Nov 27, 2013, at 23:59, Jonathan Bond-Caron wrote:
> > > On Tue Nov 26 04:02 PM, Marcos Caceres wrote:
> > > > Over the last few weeks, a few of us folks in the Web Mob IG have
> > > > been investigating the use cases and requirements for bookmarking
> > > > web apps to home screen. The output of that research  is this living
> > > > document:
> > > > http://w3c-webmob.github.io/installable-webapps/
> > > >
> > >
> > > Would seem useful to add: MAY provide the application version number.
> > 
> > Concept of version on the Web is pretty weak.
> > 
> 
> Depends how you look at the future of applications. Web/http needs to
> evolve, it was built for delivery of information not apps.
> Versioning means there's no need to parse a manifest on every single
> request.

There is no need to parse the manifest on every single request. There
are many caching solutions that would prevent downloading and parsing a
manifest that has not changed. If there is a version specified in the
manifest, it would at best be use as an indication for the user.

Also, reading the version number requires to download and parse the
manifest. Unless you set the version number in an attribute when you
link to the manifest but that would defy the purpose of the manifest
because if you update your version number you will have to change every
single page pointing to your manifest.

> > > > That (ongoing) research is helping to inform the manifest spec. A
> > > > bunch of us have been working together on IRC, twitter, etc. on a
> > > > new version of the manifest
> > > > spec:
> > > > http://w3c.github.io/manifest/
> > >
> > > Any thoughts on adding on 'app' tag? Why is the manifest in JSON?
> > >
> > > <head>
> > >  <app name="Best News!" version="1.1"
> > >  manifest="more-detailed-stuff.foo"/>
> > > </head>
> > 
> > Isn't it pretty hairy to add any element to the <head> because of the parsing
> > algorithm?
> 
> I'm not sure what you mean by hairy, it's simpler to have important
> metadata directly in the HTML. 

I do not know much about the HTML Parser but last time a feature tried
to add an element to the <head> - it was <intent> - people were told
that parsing <head> is hard and changing the parsing algorithm would be
hairy and was not worth it. I do not know the details.

--
Mounir

Received on Thursday, 28 November 2013 11:08:06 UTC