On 17 February 2015 at 02:27, Marcos Caceres <[email protected]> wrote:

>
> These are great questions. I think we should find some apps that actually
> do this (or want to do this), and talk more seriously about how to enable
> that.
>

Gaia apps are apps that do this, please don't disregard the experience that
has come from trying to build Gaia apps as web apps (they really did start
out that way, using appcache and served over HTTP) over a number of years.
Gaia is a great place to look for gaps in the web platform, because every
new API that Gaia uses was created to fulfil a requirement that the web
platform could not meet. We might have had to take some shortcuts along the
way (like packaged apps) to get a product out of the door, and we might not
yet have found the optimal solution to every use case, but the goal [1] has
always been to build Gaia using the web.


> This is the confusion: the camera app is a system service - it's not a web
> app. Of course camera input is not going to work there. The camera service
> is *supposed enable <input type="file" accept="image/*;capture=camera">*,
> not the other way around.
>

Unfortunately that isn't good enough. We want to be able to build
Instragram using the web. That won't work if the system provides the only
camera UI as browser chrome, which Instagram accesses by pressing a camera
button. Instagram wants to *be* the camera UI. If the developers of
Instagram can't build the experience they want to build using the web, then
they will just use other proprietary platforms instead.


>
> By design, you can't build system-level services an apps using web
> technology. That's what c++, Rust, or certified-level APIs are for.
>

Broadly speaking the goal of the B2G project is to fix that problem, by
redefining what is "system-level" and what can be built using the web. I
agree there should be a clear boundary between what is the web and what
isn't the web, but perhaps you don't quite appreciate the extent of what
we're asking the web to do :)

Ben

1. https://wiki.mozilla.org/Booting_to_the_Web
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