On 08/12/2014 04:04 PM, Ilya Grigorik wrote:
In short, seems like this is inventing a derivative single-page app model for building pages/apps, and that makes me wonder because it doesn't seem to make it any easier. Everything described here can be achieved with current tools, but perhaps could be made better with some smart(er) prefetch/prerender strategies?
:vingtetun can probably speak to it better than I can, but my understanding was that for Firefox OS and the Haida UX effort (https://wiki.mozilla.org/FirefoxOS/Haida) targeting mobile phones, there were some practical benefits foreseen:
- Consistent in-app page/card transitions. Each Gaia app has a custom/ad-hoc solution right now. The effort to make more reusable components will likely address this, but then a consistent platform UX still depends on apps effectively making themself "Firefox OS" specific by using the Firefox building blocks/etc.
- Consistent support of/use of edge gestures inside the app. https://wiki.mozilla.org/FirefoxOS/Haida#Edge_Gestures_Between_Open_Content
- Improved resource usage patterns by every page being an iframe with only a little stuff in it. It's harder to accidentally leak memory or get burnt by heap fragmentation if you're only doing a few things and cleaned up entirely as you are superseded. However the assumption was that these iframes would be talking to SharedWorkers which presumably would have the same problem.
While Haida apps designed for the phone form factor would never be usable on a desktop device as-is, it's neat that the pre-render mechanism makes the same underlying implementation workable for both cases, especially since it makes a "many simple pages" approach viable. Right now if you want a performant implementation, you are inevitably driven to the single-page app implementation approach.
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