Re: New manifest spec - ready for FPWD?

On Tuesday, December 3, 2013 at 3:01 PM, Jonas Sicking wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 26, 2013 at 1:02 PM, Marcos Caceres <w3c@marcosc.com (mailto:w3c@marcosc.com)> wrote:
> > The Editors would appreciate if people take a look and see if you agree with the feature set.
>  
>  
> When we did outside-of-browser-UI web apps for FirefoxOS we quickly
> found that a lot of developers want to be able to rely on UA-provided
> UI such as the back button.
>  
> Yes, the app can detect that it's running "standalone" and display a
> back button itself. However that was significantly more work than any
> other part of creating a "standalone" app, which mostly consisted in
> writing a manifest. It's especially a lot of work if you want to try
> to replicate the platform-rendered back button on all platforms.
>  
> What I think we should have is something like:
>  
> "chrome": {
> "back": true
> }


Yep, this is currently captured here:
https://github.com/w3c/manifest/issues/76

Those of us working on this still need to investigate FxOS a bit more to see what people are using in practice and why (e.g., how much granularity do we really need? to the button level “forward”/“back", or can we just say “navigation-bar”, etc.). Captured here:  
https://github.com/w3c-webmob/installable-webapps/issues/17  

> If the UA doesn't support any of the properties in the "chrome"
> section, then the UA should be required to not launch the app in
> standalone mode.

 Yeah that makes sense.  
> I also think that we need a way to put the manifest in-line in the
> main document. In part, technologies tend to be a lot easier to
> understand if you can create a single-file demo. In part, for small
> simple apps, having to separate the manifest into a separate file
> could be annoying and might drive people to stick to the existing
> meta-tags.


Would it suffice to use the API? It’s much simpler than trying to write out JSON by hand and wouldn’t require us to create any new special script type, etc.   

<script>
if(“requestBookmark” in navigator){

var appDetails = {name: “Awesome app!”, mode: “standalone”};
navigator.requestBookmark(appDetails).then(happy,sad);
}  
</script>

It’s more or less equivalent to making it declarative and easily passes the “OMG! that’s so easy!” test :)  

Obviously, devs will still need to continue using a lot of the meta tags for a while to support legacy browsers (or any browser that doesn’t implement this).  
  
> I also think the "dont-share-cookies-and-stuff" thing needs more work
> before it's ready for inclusion.

Yes, totally. It’s just there for discussion.   
> So might be better to drop that for
> FPWD. But I'm fine with keeping it in for now too and dropping it if
> we can't solidify it.
>  

I’m happy either way. I’ve been told by lawyer types elsewhere at the W3C that it’s best to pack lots of half-baked ideas into an FPWD. Gives those folks a better understanding of the impact the standard might have on them (… they will have to check again in LC, obviously, but it gives them a head start).

Received on Tuesday, 3 December 2013 05:41:16 UTC