Re: Initial research into installable web apps

(cross-posting, because that always works out well :P)

On Tuesday, November 12, 2013 at 3:41 PM, David Newton wrote:

> > At the end of november we are set to do another round of collection (it’s my turn to do it - we are taking it in turn). I’m thinking we will then do one with no user agent + one as Safari/iPhone. Plus we are trying to get the data to hold 100K sites on each round, so we can do better longitudinal data analysis. We are hoping to get the HTTP Archive to hold the data for us.  
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> If we’re running multiple user agents, it might be nice to do one empty, one w/ a newish desktop browser (in case people are sniffing for that), and one with a mobile browser.

Sounds like a plan. We could just get the script to send the request 3 times.   
  
> > Icons are going to be tricky (it’s basically favicon vs Apple’s icon + the “sizes” attribute they added to the platform). Need to describe the problem more fully in the document.  
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> There are other types of icons we might want to consider too. Windows 8 (and, I presume, Windows Phone) has <meta> stuff for tiles, e.g.:
>  
> <meta name="msapplication-TileColor" content=“#000000" />
> <meta name="msapplication-TileImage" content="mstile-144x144.png" />
> <meta name="msapplication-square70x70logo" content="mstile-70x70.png" />
> <meta name="msapplication-square150x150logo" content="mstile-150x150.png" />
> <meta name="msapplication-square310x310logo" content="mstile-310x310.png" />


Hell yeah! that would be interesting. My first run just gave me back 1883 results! I have to say, I would never have expected that- that’s huge! (no offense MS!:))  

find ./ -name "*ml.txt" | xargs grep -l "msapplication-" >> "msapplication.txt"

Running it with just “msapplication-TileImage” yield 719 hits! Must look into this more.  
  
> There’s also some open graph preview image stuff, that Facebook uses. I’m not sure if any mobile clients use it, or how it works with Facebook’s mobile stuff.
>  
> <meta property="og:image" content="logo.png" />

I think we should consider this out of scope for now. Just want to focus on Web -> Native…. unless this somehow supported by some native platform or used by a browser to integrate into a native platform.  
  
> There’s also the possibility of the favicon and apple touch icon stuff being present at the site root, but not explicitly listed in a <meta> tag. Is that something we care to check for?


Right now, just interested in checking the markup, as the key indicator for an installable web apps is “apple-mobile-web-app-capable".  

--  
Marcos Caceres

Received on Tuesday, 12 November 2013 16:38:07 UTC