w3c/miniapp-white-paper

MiniApp Standardization White Paper

This repository is the home of the MiniApp Standardization White Paper being worked on by the MiniApps Working Group.

Useful links

• The MiniApp Standardization White Paper
• The MiniApps WG homepage

miniapp-white-paper's Issues

Missing w3c.json

See https://w3c.github.io/w3c.json.html

The description of necessity of MiniApps Download/Install is vague

In section 1.4.1, it is claimed that MiniApp does not need download/install.

	the Web	Native App	MiniApp
Download/Install	No	Yes	No

While in section 2.1.3, there is statement saying:

After downloading and installing a MiniApp package, all static page templates/CSS/JavaScript files need to present app pages are already exist on users' machine.

Do we need more clarification here?

Reason PWA isn't enough is poorly explained

Section 1.3 of the whitepaper, Can we just use PWA?, doesn't provide any compelling reason why we can't. It argues that web browsers and super apps are fundamentally different and that super apps could not simply expose their extended features as Web APIs to PWA rendered in their native webviews, but fails short of explaining why that is true.

WebView relevant proposals may not be appropriate here

In "Working with the Web" section, there are several proposals to WebView. IMHO, WebView should not be considered as owned by web community. It is owned by Google.

Relationship to W3C Widgets/Packaged Web Applications?

It seems the MiniApp proposal has a lot of overlap with W3C Widgets and quite similar use cases and requirements: zip'ed up HTML, JS, CSS, etc. with a XML manifest and possibly some kind of digital signature.

It would be good to update the white paper to point out any differences, and why it wasn't used instead? Also, it would be great to hear how the mini-app proposal aims to overcome the limitations that were encountered with W3C Widgets (and similar packaged web application technologies).

Illustration of a MiniApp page

Because the concept of a page in a MiniApp is not exactly the same as that of the web, it would be more intuitive to have a picture to indicate what a page in a MiniApp is.