Project Fugu interview: Bridging the app gap

We spoke with Thomas Steiner, a Developer Advocate at Google Hamburg, about Project Fugu, a major player in the development of a PWA standard. Project Fugu is a cross-company effort from Google, Microsoft, and Intel focused on improving the web. Discover the process behind designing new APIs at Project Fugu and how it will bridge the app gap.
JAXenter: Progressive Enhancement is something you hear quite often in the context of PWA. What exactly is it referring to?
Thomas Steiner: Back in March 2003, Nick Finck and Steven Champeon stunned the web design world with the concept of progressive enhancement:
“Rather than hoping for graceful degradation, [progressive enhancement] builds documents for the least capable or differently capable devices first, then moves on to enhance those documents with separate logic for presentation, in ways that don’t place an undue burden on baseline devices but which allow a richer experience for those users with modern graphical browser software.”
While in 2003, progressive enhancement was mostly about using presentational features like at the time modern CSS properties, unobtrusive JavaScript for improved usability, and even nowadays basic things like Scalable Vector Graphics; I see progressive enhancement in 2020 as being about using new functional browser capabilities.
SEE ALSO: Python web framework JustPy – interactive websites without JavaScript
JAXenter: Project Fugu is a major player in the development of a PWA standard. What is that, who is behind it?
Thomas Steiner: The Capabilities Project (or Project Fugu) aims to bridge what we call the app gap: We want to enable the web to access native app capabilities without having to compromise user security, privacy, or trust, or having to package entire app runtimes. Giving developers these new tools will empower the open web as a place where almost any experience can be created, and make it a first-class platform for developing apps that run on any browser, with any operating system, and on any device. We design and develop these new capabilities in an open and transparent way in the W3C’s Web Incubator Community Group (WICG) using the existing open web platform standards processes while getting early feedback from developers and other browser vendors as we iterate on the design of these features to ensure its interoperability.
This work is a cross-company effort, with contributors from Google, Microsoft, and Intel. The monthly meetings are open to active contributors and have shared notes, accessible to anyone in the Chromium organization.