Re: WebApps functionality

["Jeremiah C. Foster" <jeremiah foster puri sm>]

On Wed, 2020-04-15 at 14:22 -0500, Michael Catanzaro wrote:
> Well you must have some appstream metadata, or the web app will not 
> appear in GNOME Software. But Epiphany itself never looks at the 
> appstream metadata. I would completely ignore that page of the spec 
> because none of that metadata will be used  for anything.

At Purism we intend to use that Appstream metadata for a variety of
things, like determining if the app is suitable for a small screen,
etc. 

> If you want web apps to have more features... well, I'm not working
> on 
> it myself, but patches welcome. What most users would be interested
> in 
> is not appstream, though, but Web App Manifest from 
> https://www.w3.org/TR/appmanifest/. 

I should review this, maybe this is good input for Appstream
specification work.

> Not all of the fields in that spec 
> would make sense for Epiphany, but probably some could be supported. 
> The question would be: how would installation work?

Okay, I'll look at this and try and have some useful input. 

> Ideally, before putting more effort into web apps, which are semi-
> dead 
> due to the lack of flatpak support, we would figure out how to make 
> them work in flatpak. 

This is an interesting idea but seems to imply that a web app is going
to need one of the flatpak'd runtimes which might be overkill for a web
app? 

> What we need is a sort of replication portal to 
> allow apps to install and delete different versions of themselves.

Regards,

Jeremiah