[whatwg] Splash screen proposal for web apps ?

[Mounir Lamouri]

On 01/08/13 19:17, Laurent Perez wrote:
> Our user agent is a HTTP proxy, currently we are feeding it HTML5 pages,
> then we are parsing custom data-* attributes and replacing them with UI
> components, for example data-carousel becomes a touch carousel, and so on.
> 
> Instead of creating another data-splashscreen attribute, we always try
> standards first, so I'm evaluating the widgets spec, PhoneGap went the
> <feature> splashscreen way, RIM chose a <rim:splash> vendor namespace. On
> top of that there is also the manifest spec, implemented by Firefox OS.

There have been a lot of discussions at Mozilla around this feature
recently. The first released versions of Firefox OS have some kind of
automatic splash screen mechanism that is under-optimised and not very
accurate so our front end engineers asked for a declarative solution in
the Web Manifest so they could tweak its behaviour. It seems to match
what you are asking.

The conclusions of our discussions are that a splash screen is not
needed because the first paint of a page can be very quick if the page
is designed for this. If all the scripts, stylesheets and content are
loaded synchronously, your page will look slow and a splash screen might
be required but the Web has many features that allow developers to be
smart about time load.

Even for applications that need to do some loading by design (let say a
game that need to load assets), it is more efficient if the page itself
handles the splash screen by loading a simple DOM + stylesheet that
would show "Loading. Please wait." rather than having the UA taking care
of it. The UA will have a hard time to know when to stop loading the
splash screen, when to stop it and would have many limitations around
animated splash screen, internationalisation, etc.

> The sysapps WG is what I was looking for, thanks :)

The Web Manifest lives in WebApps WG nowadays, you might want to bring
that feature request if you still want it.

Cheers,
--
Mounir