Thanks for forwarding this! Rather timely as I am looking at
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=768881
Its a valid point that features are different from permissions, so my initial
take in the bug is probably wrong.
But I'm concerned that if we categorized permissions by "required" vs
"optional" that would be confusing and fundamentally incorrect. Implicit
permissions are permissions that can be granted to a given category of
applications without user involvement (but still needs to be enumerated in the
manifest); explicit permissions are ones that need to be approved by the user.
Having two groupings in the manifest could give developers the mistaken
impression that they can take an explicit permission (say camera access), and
just put that in the implicit ("required") section of the manifest instead and
no longer have to ask the user.
Since the behavior of the permissions is a function of the particular
permissions being requested + type of application, breaking these out in the
manifest doesn't seem beneficial.
Lucas.
On Jun 18, 2012, at 9:44 PM, Ian Bicking wrote:
> I wanted to refer to the thread "Proposed changes to manifest" from
> February 7 2012, but it was another one of those threads that happened
> before the archives were fixed. For the purpose of the archives I'll
> make a crude copy here (and a couple messages not copied here did get
> into the archives:
> https://groups.google.com/d/topic/mozilla.dev.webapps/8O-yYTRJGUk/discussion)
>
> ----------------------------------------
> Anant Narayanan [email protected]
> Feb 7
> to dev-webapps
>
>
> We've been kicking around some ideas for some new entries in the
> manifest. Myk, Ragavan & I had an ad-hoc chat about them yesterday,
> and here I sum up the proposal we came up with:
>
> 1. An app should be able to specify what screen sizes / form factors
> they explicitly support (i.e. look good on)
>
> 2. An app should be able to specify what features it needs to run.
> This has two categories, required features (those without which the
> app won't run at all) and desired features (those which add some extra
> functionality) to the app.
>
> 3. An app should be able to specify what permissions the app needs to
> run. Permissions are distinguishable from features in that features
> are more about what a device *can* do, and permissions deal with
> whether the user has *allowed* the app to do something
>
> To clarify the difference between (2) and (3), for eg.: WebGL is a
> feature, not a permission, as not all devices support it, but we
> require no special permission to use on devices that do. Conversely,
> every device has filesystem access but such access requires granting
> explicit permission to the app.
>
> We decided to defer discussion on permissions in the manifest for now
> because of the complex implications of doing so. We would, however,
> like to support the first two (screen size & features) as soon as
> possible. A rough proposal to do both follows:
>
>
> * Form factors: We adopt a model similar to android where we let an
> application specify a minimum width and maximum width in 'dp'
> (density-independent pixels).
>
> * Features: We adopt the list of features that the Modernizr library
> currently supports (http://www.modernizr.com/docs/#s2)
>
> The changes to manifest proposed:
>
> {
> …
> "screen_size": {
> "smallest_width": <N>dp,
> "largest_width": <N>dp
> },
>
> "required_features": ["feature1", "feature2", ...]
> …
> }
>
> The array elements of the required properties can only be one of a
> pre-defined list (that we will borrow from Modernizr), examples
> include: fontface, flexbox, opacity, csstransforms, canvas,
> applicationcache, audio, video, indexeddb, websockets, webworkers,
> localstorage, touch (and so on…). The property is named
> "required_features" to keep the door open to a property named
> "desired_features" if there is a concrete use case that comes up
> later.
>
> If there are no major objections to the proposal, we can make these
> changes to the manifest and figure out an implementation path!
>
> Regards,
> -Anant
>
>
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