Why altname?

[mounirlamouri]

I read the UC document and have not seen any reason why altname was added. Did I miss something?

[ernesto-jimenez]

The widgets spec and native cocoa allow developers to define a "short name" besides the regular name.

If we were to add something like this, I would add a short_name property rather than altname. However, I'm not convinced about the need for this yet.

[ernesto-jimenez]

I spoke about this with @marcoscaceres and @benfrancis on IRC.

The current purpose for alt name is to provide the system better information on what the app is for features like app search. E.g: if you install Yahoo Weather for iPhone the app is called Weather in the home screen, but you can search for "Yahoo" and the system would find it.

With that being said, altname is just a tentative solution to that use case and will be fixed letter. We might opt for something different.

[marcoscaceres]

@mounirlamouri I'm ok to removing this if you are still not sold on it - you make a valid point that I should have not had included this without first having the use case outlined in the document. We were kinda forced to release the manifest document a little bit more early than I wanted to. I can expand out the use case in the document with more examples.

[marcoscaceres]

Filed issue: w3c-webmob/installable-webapps#25

[marcoscaceres]

Discussed with @mounirlamouri. We decided it's best to leave this to a future version of the spec.