[whatwg] Installable web apps

[Charles McCathieNevile]

On Fri, 18 Feb 2011 06:27:48 +0100, Biju <bijumaillist at gmail.com> wrote:

> IE 9 is introducing meta-tags for custom jumplist actions (+ Pinned  
> Sites).
> Mozilla is also planning to do same
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=605222
> Some website (http://www.pcworld.com/ ) already started using it !!!
>
> At present IE9 make jumplist using msapplication-*
> If we dont make any standard now it will ugly to see pages with lot of
> meta tags named
> appleapplication-*, ubuntuapplication-*, redhatapplication-*,
> fedoraapplication-*
> and also tags for Web App support in Fennec
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=583750
>
> Also I did not like current implementation with a meta tag for each item.
> http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg131029
> I wish whole list was kept in an external file (like the proposed
> <link rel="application-description" href="myapp.json">) to avoid this
> same meta tag clutter on every page.

So this seems closely aligned with the use of config.xml in W3C widgets  
(and various others that build on that).

> Did anybody discussed with IE team about already proposed <link
> rel="application-description" href="myapp.json"> ?
> Looks like IE team only just used Ian's comment for
>>> - a name
>>  <meta name=application-name content="Flickr">

Perhaps it makes sense to think about using a single metadata file (as  
widgets do), and allow Web apps based on a server to associate a  
config.xml (or JSON equivalent? Why not reinvent the syntax a few  
times...). You may also want a file manifest like appCache, but if you  
want the thing to run offline you could just require that it use appCache  
etc anyway.

Widgets don't do that because they have a packaging concept where  
everything is already in the package, which is to allow for simple offline  
installation and signature, whereas the webapp model requires continually  
trusting the server. On the other hand, it seems that there are plenty of  
people happy to trust facebook, google, farmville and so on anyway, so we  
wouldn't be opening them to new security problems.

cheers

Chaals

-- 
Charles McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg lærer norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals       Try Opera: http://www.opera.com