[whatwg] Installed Apps

[David Levin]

It sounds like most of the concerns are about the 2nd part of this proposal:
allowing a background page to continue running after the visible page has
been closed.

However, the first part sounds like it alone would be useful to web
applications like GMail:

The first, which should begenerally useful, is the ability to have a hidden
HTML/JS page running
in the background that can access the DOM of visible windows. This
page should be accessible from windows that the user navigates to. We
call this background Javascript window a "shared context" or a
"background page". This will enable multiple instances of a web app
(e.g. tearoff windows in Gmail) to cleanly access the same user state
no matter which windows are open.


+ restrict things to the same security origin.

It sounds similar in concept to a share worker except that it runs in the
main thread and is more concerned with dom manipulation/state while workers
have typically been thought of as allowing background processing.

It seems that the lifetime of this could be scoped, so that it dies when it
isn't referenced (in a similar way to how shared worker lifetime is scoped).

Dave

On Mon, Jul 27, 2009 at 6:39 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs at apple.com> wrote:

>
> On Jul 27, 2009, at 7:13 PM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
>
>  I'm not clear how the UI requirements here are different from
>> persistent workers, though.  Those also persist after the user
>> navigates away, right?
>>
>
> Persistent workers are even more of a security risk, since they are
> supposed to persist even after the browser has been restarted, or after the
> system has been rebooted. Persistent workers should be renamed to "BotNet
> Construction Kit".
>
> Regards,
> Maciej
>
>
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