On 1 August 2013 12:44:19 Scott Wilson <scott.bradley.wil...@gmail.com> wrote:
Or you could perhaps use XML. A bit like, er, this:
http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets/
Hehe ;)
I'm trying to address two things:
1. it's been shown ever and over again that developers on the wild web are
really bad at working with strict syntax. HTML, XHTML that won't parse with
right mime type, even RSS ended up as a soup.
Strict manifest will inevitably face the same tension - either single
misplaced JSON comma or XML quote will break the app (and frustrate
developers) or browsers and other clients will eventually give up again and
accept almost-JSON soup that "works".
HTML already got past that and deals with real-world mess. Let's not tempt
JSON5 :)
2. Pave the cow paths. We already define web apps using meta tags,
including bunch of Apple's tags for web apps ("added to home screen" kind).
Meta is a well-understood existing mechanism that works. Everybody building
web apps creates and references HTML pages with metatags all the time.
Another very important aspect of it is that it lowers the learning curve a lot.
You learn how to add one meta (that's the charset, should be mandatory for
every dev). You then learn few more metas for favicons, google, viewport,
mobile Safari. You copy&paste them. *Then* you learn how to create common
file, and you do it based on whatever you have working already.
Very easy and gradual.
OTOH new format, with new names, new structure, no comments in JSON case,
new and annoyingly pedantic syntax and separate file from day 1 is jumping
on the deep end.
It's trivial for us, experienced developers in this forum, to write JSON
manifest, but beginners on the web start with copy&paste and very little
knowledge (and that's good! That's a low barrier to entry) so reusing their
skills and letting them learn in small increments will help them a lot.
Also look into the future - if Web Components with <link rel=import> take
off you'll have lots of pages importing HTML of jQuery of components.
HTML import might become natural and logical way of extending pages, and
JSON may remain the odd exception.
--
regards, Kornel
