On 7/8/2013 5:31 PM, Ben Francis wrote:
What's sad about this vision of the future is that many of the most interesting apps that get written using web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript will not actually be part of the web.
I don't think this is true or sad!
One of the fundamental strengths of the web is that you can download an entire "page" and save it locally, and even view-source and hack it.
With the advent of online web apps, it has become much more difficult to view-source the web, because dynamic loading and complex multi-page apps often don't give you a way to download and view-source the entire app. It also means that there is often not clear separate between the client logic in the app and the server logic that most apps depend on.
Packaged apps are the most elegant "stupidly simple" solution to the offline problem that continues to plague those who want unpackaged apps to work as if they were downloadable entities.
Packaged apps are not a problem or something to be "sad" about, but something to rejoice in. They are a way of empowering users. We should be encouraging all app authors to use packaged apps, even if they don't need any special permissions.
To solve the problems mentioned by TimBL, we should just make sure that servers can serve up a packaged app at a URL, and clients can just use it and choose to keep it on their homescreen or not, and their client would keep using that URL to check for updates. (Ignoring for the moment the special security requirements with high-privilege APIs, stores, signing, and all that stuff). Then "app search" is again the same as "web search".
--BDS _______________________________________________ dev-b2g mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-b2g
