[whatwg] Installed Apps

[Patrick Mueller]

Michael Davidson wrote:

> ...
> 
> WHY NOT SHARED WORKERS
> 
> Shared workers and persistent workers are designed to solve similar
> problems, but don't meet our needs. The key difference between what
> we're proposing and earlier proposals for persistent workers is that
> background pages would be able to launch visible windows and have full
> DOM access.  This is different from the model of workers where all
> interaction with the DOM has to be done through asynchronous message
> passing. We would like background pages to be able to drive UI in a
> visible window using the techniques (DOM manipulation, innerHTML) that
> are common today. We believe that more apps would be able to take
> advantage of a background page if they didn't require rewriting the
> app in the asynchronous, message-passing style required by workers.

hmmm ... this is the worrying part to me.  Sounds like one of the 
presumed qualities of web workers, ease of use, isn't going to be met 
with the currently spec'd APIs.  Is there some way to framework-ize 
something around the current APIs to make this easier to use by 
developers?  Or would the addition of a synchronous API help (assuming 
some non-evil synchronous API)?  Or do we need a lot of head shaping 
around asynchronous message sending?

Futher question would be whether there are two issues: dealing with 
asynchronous messages, and direct DOM API.  If we could get over the 
hurdle of the async, do we still need the direct DOM API?

-- 
Patrick Mueller - http://muellerware.org