OWD project: WebView information on MDN

[wbamberg]

This proposal was originally made in mdn/content but was deleted from there in mdn/content#13768. Restoring and copying into openwebdocs.

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This RFC proposes that we work on adding WebView documentation to MDN, to help
web developers figure out how to test and support WebView environments (i.e. iOS
and Android WebView-based "mega app" type environments).

This would include:

• What is a WebView environment?
• How frequently WebView environments are used and in what regions they are
  used the most.
• How WebView environments differ from their browser counterparts.
• How to test a site in WebView environments.
• How to detect whether a site is running in a WebView environment at runtime.
• General overview of WebView API compatibility patterns, exceptions, and pain
  points, e.g. how to handle feature detection false positives.

Problem statement

WebView environments are used more than you might think (early data suggests
that up to 20% of Android web use is WebView), but there is very little
information available on how to effectively support them, and some thorny
problems to overcome, for example certain features that are supported in a
rendering engine but don't work because of environmental differences.

Priority assessment

This table checks this project against the OWD prioritization criteria.

• Effort: Low to medium. This is probably not a huge amount of content.
• Dependencies: Need to find experts in this area to help.
• Community enablement: Potentially, yes. Each page is a self-contained task.
• Momentum: Medium. WebView usage is on the rise; more people are becoming
  aware of these issues.
• Enabling learners: Not really.
• Enabling professionals: Yes.
• Underrepresented topics / Ethical web: n/a.
• Operational necessities: n/a.
• Addressing the needs of the web industry: Yes. As mentioned before, this
  kind of information is becoming more sought after.

Proposed solutions

We need to write this content.

Task list

• Write out summary of what content we want to produce, and organize it into a
  set of pages.
• Write an issue for each page, and try to enlist the help of experts in this area to
  write the content.
• Contact folks in the community who might be willing to help write such
  pages. Get them working on pages.
• Create a spreadsheet to track progress on each page.

Useful links

• What is in a Web View? An Analysis of Progressive Web App Features When the Means
  of Web Access is not a Web Browser by
  Thomas Steiner.
• https://www.w3.org/groups/cg/webview
• https://webview-cg.github.io/usage-and-challenges/
• https://www.w3.org/2022/09/16-webview-minutes.html

[tomayac]

As the author of the paper mentioned above, I grant MDN and OWD folks full access to my material and sources. The LaTeX source is probably easy enough to convert to Markdown. The paper is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivs 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) license, but I waive the license exclusively for MDN and OWD, so no attribution is required.

[realadamsmith]

I 2nd this since one of my biggest private projects uses webview.

[Elchi3]

The W3C WebView CG seems to have been restarted.

There is an issue that WebView compat is going to part of the CG's charter: WebView-CG/charter#12 "The chairs are proposing that we add the deliverable, a webview compatibility report. This would serve as a reference point into the differences between different WebView providers."

@wbamberg Maybe we want to join the community group calls and see how we could participate? They seem to happen on a monthly basis. Meeting notes from December 2023: https://github.com/WebView-CG/meetings/blob/main/2023/2023-12-15.md. Next one seems to be on 26 January 2024, 16:00–17:00 UTC.

[muodov]

@Elchi3 @wbamberg I participate in WebView CG on behalf of DuckDuckGo, and I'm sure everyone there will be happy to hear your perspective!

[RupertBenWiser]

Howdy all 👋 co-chair of the WebView CG here.

Just adding a +1 to @muodov 's comment. We will of course want to first make sure that the group is in favor of this new deliverable but it would be great to hear from your side how this could benefit the web.

I look forward to seeing you there.