On Wednesday, July 15, 2015 at 3:34:42 PM UTC+10, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 15, 2015 at 12:00 AM,  <mar...@marcosc.com> wrote:
> >  * It's not clear what problems manifest solves
> 
> This is by far the biggest problem. I think we ended up with manifests
> because packages have manifests and iOS/Android use packages for
> applications, but none of that translates well to the web.
> 
> >  * Extra HTTP request could yield a performance penalty (even if 
> > deprioritized)... though probably not a concern in a HTTP2 world.
> 
> It's still a concern. You'll still need to duplicate all the metadata
> that the client needs immediately in the HTML.

We were careful to not have any immediately required metadata in the manifest. 
The stuff in the manifest is only applied after the web application is 
installed to a user's device and the application is run from the home screen 
(see Chrome's implementation). 
  
> One reason that was mentioned in favor of manifests was "don't repeat
> yourself". The way the web has dealt with that for two decades is
> server-side templating.

You might be forgetting, you know, <link rel stylesheet> and <script src> + 
anything that has a `src` attribute that relies on pulling stuff from the web 
and putting it into the browser cache so it can be applied across multiple 
pages. 

The idea with the manifest is the same: it is "applied" to a web application 
across multiple pages, like CSS, JS, etc. This is why it uses <link rel> and it 
is not inlined. 
 
> I agree with Martin that focusing on concrete problems to solve is a
> more worthwhile endeavor.

Agree. I want to do two concrete things immediately:

1. Enhance browser tiles: many sites have nice logos/icons, and they have an 
application-name. I want to show the application-name and icon or logo them in 
tiles in the new tab page. 

2. Page previews suck today: they are mostly broken, don't show the right 
content, they are badly zoomed, and don't lead me to the right place. Be nice 
if developers could provide a link to a page I can render in a tile + a 
"preferred start URL". As a developer, I want this tile to get updated using a 
push notification and I want it to work offline. 

Those are the concrete problems I, and others, care about solving. We can solve 
those with web manifest, but I'm all ears if you folks want to propose 
something else :) 

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