[dts]

Layout and performance of the mobile web is a red herring in the argument of why mobile web is losing. It's not just this. There are so many other factors that I rarely see mentioned. Encrypted / protected caches, local databases, far more persistent logins and UUIDS, sensor integration without the annoying Browser requests x feature modals, launching from the home screen, consistency of experiences because of standard human-interface guidelines, background sync and notifications, integrated payment systems, and on and on.

Apps integrate with the entire rich ecosystem of the device and web apps barely / inconsistently do. There is work happening on all of the above things (kind of), but the experiences arent competitive, the work is piecemeal and the pace is far too slow for people who have the webs best interests at heart. The web is losing because the consensus model for standardising and making available the tools for building the web is antiquated and terribly ineffective. Unless there is a massive change in incentives for standards committees and mobile browser providers this wont change.

[frik]

local databases:

SQLite is available on Android and iOS by default, and available for WinPhone 8.

Yet, some die-hard NoSQL lovers stopped the HTML5 Web SQL Database API: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_SQL_Database

It's still available in all WebKit based browsers incl. Android and iOS. But famously Firefox/FirefoxOS and IE/WinPhone don't support it. The proposed NoSQL replacement IndexedDB has a complicated API and never got traction, one has to basically use a shim library. Working with several tables and indexes is trivial in SQL, but complicated and requires a lot of specific code in IndexedDB (NoSQL).

There would be place for SQL as well as NoSQL in HTML5.

* The argument that WebSQL was tailored to a specific SQLite version is nonsense. SQLite supports the official SQL92 standard, as do several other SQL embedded engines like the SQL engines from MS Access, MS Outlook, MS SQL Embedded and many others. Also Firefox already ships with SQLite for its "awesome bar" and bookmark feature.

* Also the argument that it's "hard" to sync a client side database with a server side database is nonsense. But the two argument basically stopped Web SQL as HTML5 API :( The developers who voted against Web SQL were (former) employees of two big server side SQL db vendors (see the related mailing lists and blog).

Nowadays with the rise of NewSQL movement of people who burnt their fingers with NoSQL, one can only hope someone gives some love to Web SQL.

To sum up, NoSQL has it's place and SQL has one too.

[bphogan]

Can't upvote this enough. If there's anyone here on the W3C, consider this an upvote for bringing back WebSQL.

IndexedDB reminds me a lot of the Drag and Drop stuff the W3C settled on: several different kinds of awful.

[throwaway41597]

Agreed, IndexedDB delayed the mobile web for 4-5 years.

Mozilla should have just shipped SQLite early and focused of proper file APIs and threading so developers can use any database that can be written in javascript. It turns out that specifying a database API takes years, having people agree on it and implementing it takes some more.

Even today, as IndexedDB is implemented by all browsers, both Firefox and Safari have a quick and dirty implementation written on top of SQLite, giving us less performance on a reduced API. Chrome has LevelDB (which is awesome!) on the backend but the result isn't much faster in my experience. IE I don't remember.

[hiphopyo]

> launching from the home screen

https://github.com/cubiq/add-to-homescreen