> That seems like a good plan.  Has anyone ever tried formalizing it  
and
 > floating it around to other vendors?

I figured I should jump into the thread since I can provide some  
perspective on the UI from another vendor.  I'm a principal designer  
on Firefox and this is a feature that I'm really passionate about.

 > > The UA would expose some way to activate all of this  
functionality for
 > > a site in "one shot"...

I totally agree that users should be able to give Web apps additional  
privileges in "one shot," as opposed to having to give them permission  
to do things like use offline storage, register to handle local files,  
and produce notifications individually (although we will likely allow  
users to revoke specific permissions).

 > > then a menu item in the browser might activate that
 > > the user could use to activate it.

We are considering a menu item as well, however we haven't determined  
the best way to describe the action.  I'm concerned that the term  
"install" has connotations that the Web app will actually be served  
locally (like how Zimbra desktop deploys with Mozilla's Prism), and a  
lot of users may have difficulty wrapping their head around what it  
literally means to install a Web app.

We are also looking into granting these additional app privileges  
implicitly through actions that the user takes, like dragging a tab  
into the OS X dock or Windows quick launch bar.  Additionally in  
Firefox 4 if the user drags a tab to the left our new Home Tab they  
will be able to create a small persistent tab (called an "app tab")  
that will be automatically granted these additional privileges.

A third option that I've been thinking about is adding a new item to  
the Windows start menu and OS X applications folder named "Add Web  
Application."  I think this works reasonably well conceptually since  
the app being created will ultimately be accessible next to the rest  
of the user's desktop applications.  However, presenting UI outside of  
the browser is a little more aggressive than Firefox usually behaves.

While UA interfaces are of course well outside of the scope of the  
standardization process for APIs, I think the Web as a whole would  
benefit if we coordinated to present a somewhat similar interface for  
this feature, at least in terms of terminology, any symbols used, etc.

-Alex Faaborg


On Oct 2, 4:23 pm, Jeremy Orlow <[email protected]> wrote:
 > That seems like a good plan.  Has anyone ever tried formalizing it  
and
 > floating it around to other vendors?
 >
 > On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 4:11 PM, Ben Goodger (Google)  
<[email protected]>wrote:
 >
 > > This relates somewhat to how we'd like people to "install" web
 > > applications.
 >
 > > For that we figured a site would publish a manifest in some format
 > > (there was some talk about something like the extensions manifest)
 > > that specifies all kinds of appy things a site can do, like large
 > > icons, protocol schemes and mime types it can handle and the URLs  
for
 > > each, etc etc.
 >
 > > The UA would expose some way to activate all of this  
functionality for
 > > a site in "one shot"... e.g. if the site published the data via  
some
 > > kind of <link> tag then a menu item in the browser might activate  
that
 > > the user could use to activate it.
 >
 > > -Ben
 >
 > > On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 2:55 PM, Jeremy Orlow  
<[email protected]> wrote:
 > > > On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 2:48 PM, Peter Kasting  
<[email protected]>
 > > wrote:
 >
 > > >> On Fri, Oct 2, 2009 at 2:47 PM, Jeremy Orlow  
<[email protected]>
 > > wrote:
 >
 > > >>> Is this API even part of any standard?  Maybe we should bring  
this up
 > > on
 > > >>> WhatWG?
 >
 > > >> The thread title is a clue that these are specced in HTML5 :)
 >
 > > > Not really.  People abuse the term HTML5.  Good example:  
WebSockets,
 > > > WebDatabase, LocalStorage, Workers, and many of the other APIs we
 > > associate
 > > > with HTML5 are not in that spec.
 > > > Anyhow, apparently this was discussed very recently and I  
somehow missed
 > > the
 > > > discussion:
 > >http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-September/02 
...
 > > > I'll try to take a look at the thread some time soon.  Ben and/ 
or other
 > > UI
 > > > guys, maybe you should too.  Now is the time to make noise if  
we think
 > > this
 > > > is a bad API.
 > > > J

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