In my last post I discussed offline storage for web apps, and that I wasn’t sure how users were supposed to know that certain apps worked offline. Google Chrome has come up with a neat solution for this that allows users to “install” web apps via their Chrome Web Store. I’d played around with its previous incarnation, when it was the Chrome Extension Gallery, but I hadn’t really been back since it opened up to web apps and changed its name.

The Chrome Web Store is interesting because you can submit both packaged apps and hosted apps. A hosted apps is simply a zip file of a metadata file and some icons. The metadata file explains general information like the URL for the app and if it works online or not.

Installing a hosted app is sort of a fancy way of bookmarking it, but the fact Chrome tells you whether it works offline or not is a big plus. This solves the issue of letting users know that an app’s URL will work even when they don’t have an internet connection.

This is exactly the kind of thing I was looking for! To try it out, I decided to create hosted apps of my Text to ASCII Art Generator and JavaScript Snake Game:

• Text to ASCII Art Generator App
• JavaScript Snake Game App

Both work offline, and I plan to create hosted apps of some of my other programs too, but for now I’m just testing the waters. FireFox will also soon launch a web app store called The Mozilla Marketplace. It’s setup will be similar to chrome’s, though it’ll be slightly more feature rich, allowing you to run web apps like Desktop programs. This feature is similar to the idea behind W3C Widgets, though W3C Widgets seem to have fallen out of favor.

As an aside, before I ended up at Chrome’s Web Store, I took a detour through the world of W3C Widgets. I hadn’t heard of them before, and unless the tides change, I may not hear much about them again. However, I figured I’d write up what I learned, since they seem to be one of the least popular pieces in the HTML5 puzzle.

W3C Widgets?

While researching offline web storage, I was bothered by the fact that normal users would have no idea that certain URLs still worked when they were offline. With this concern, I ended up emailing the W3C’s fixing-appcache mailing list because I could only find a small bit of discussion on the topic, and that discussion didn’t come to a consensus about what to do. The response I got was pretty interesting, and made me realize there were areas to the HTML5 world that I hadn’t seen:

This is essentially what the Widgets spec is supposed to achieve.  See
here for an example of a widget configuration:

http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets/#example-configuration-document

It makes sense to split packaging a website from providing offline
storage/caching technologies, since the two are different solutions to
different problems.  It's true that there is some crossover,
especially if a widget includes content in its package.  But the
widgets spec has its own problems, not least of which is a terrible
name.

Letting users know that your site will work when offline doesn't seem
like a terribly difficult problem to solve at the application level,
to be honest. I think as a developer I'd rather browser vendors spend
their time on other stuff :-).  But it's certainly a fair point, and
does need to be considered as part of the UX of your app.

After thinking about it, he was right about separating out the packaging of an app from its offline storage capability. However, what was this widgets spec he mentioned? I’d never heard of W3C Widgets, so I decided to some research.

W3C Widgets are essentially packaged web apps. In fact, at one point, ppk proposed that they be put under the buzz word “HTML5 apps”. The W3C Widget spec discusses a format similar to Chrome extensions. You have a zip file of a directory structure containing HTML, CSS and JavaScirpt files, with a config.xml file that explains the basic metadata of the widget. Widgets can be embedded within a webpage or run from a user’s desktop. Not exactly what I was looking for, but it sounds kind of neat. Why had I never heard of this before? I did some more googling and the vast majority of the blogs and news regarding W3C Widgets seemed to be from 2009 or 2010. I could find nothing on Chrome, FireFox or IE implementing the spec – even though as of September 27, 2011, it became an official W3C recommendation.

I did, however, find a hand full of projects that used the spec. While there wasn’t a lot of buzz around W3C Widgets, there appeared to be enough going on with them that they weren’t in danger of falling into the abyss, at least not yet. Below is a list of the projects I found with some notes I made on them.

• Opera’s Web Browser – Opera appears to have fully embraced W3C Widgets and is using the spec for Opera extensions. They’ve also set the browser up so that it will run widgets that you launch from your desktop. So its basically allowing you to create native-ish HTML5 apps. I find it peculiar that no other vendor has embraced W3C Widgets like Opera has.
• Apache Wookie – This appears to be a widget environment and it reminds me of the OZone Widget Framework. Though Apache Wookie runs W3C widgets while OZone runs OZone widgets.
• Phonegap – This framework allows developers to create HTML5 apps that can be distributed in mobile phone app stores. Its app configuration is based on the W3C Widget spec.
• Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) – “An allegiance of telecommunications firms and others working together to create a common mobile platform” [ref]. W3C Widgets are apart of what they’re doing. However, according to this article, they ended up failing.

So each of these projects is kind of cool, but none of them addressed the original problem I had – how the hell are users supposed to know they have web apps installed on their computers that will work when they’re offline? And if W3C Widgets are the answer, why aren’t the major vendors adopting them? Eventually I had some nice people direct me towards the Chrome Web Store, and it was also nice to find out that FireFox will soon have its own web store too. Hopefully IE10 will do something similar when it comes out.

Even though I didn’t find them useful, it was interesting to learn about the existence of W3C Widgets. I’m not sure why they seem to have failed, as they’re essentially a way of packaging HTML5 apps. Though then again, I do think Chrome’s manifest is a lot nicer than the config.xml that the W3C Widget spec detailed.