[GitHub] [cordova-windows] breautek edited a comment on issue #398: Absolute (root relative) paths do not resolve to www folder, instead point to C:\...

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breautek edited a comment on issue #398:
URL: https://github.com/apache/cordova-windows/issues/398#issuecomment-951482318


   > why is the most core functionality (loading an html file with 1 image) not consistent with the browser and the way web apps are served?
   
   It is consistent. Cordova doesn't handle file paths, it just tells the underlying webview what file path to load. If you're loading a filepath from the `file://` protocol then the "root" directory is always relative to the filesystem, which in windows case, it's the drive's root. If you wanted to load an image file, you'd either need the full absolute path to that image, or a relative path relative to the HTML document.
   
   > maybe I am naïve here, but this seems like a major oversight in design/principles 
   
   I'll admit that I'm not all that familiar with the windows platform specifically. iOS platform implements an iOS-specific API called [WKURLSchemeHandler](https://developer.apple.com/documentation/webkit/wkurlschemehandler?language=objc), and our android platform implements something called [WebViewAssetLoader](https://developer.android.com/reference/androidx/webkit/WebViewAssetLoader), which essentially makes the web app origin `app://localhost` and `https://localhost` respectfully, which is sounds like what you're asking for the windows platform (because the absolute paths will be relative to the origin `https://localhost`), but afaik Windows underlying webview does not provide any equivalent API. 
   
   I actually had a [brief discussion](https://github.com/apache/cordova-android/pull/1137#issuecomment-736788006) on routing when talking about the Android platform when the WebViewAssetLoader was implemented but it was decided that URL rewriting/routing is an application detail and not something Cordova should be responsible for.
   
   > cordova's main use case is packaging web apps into cross platform native apps.
   
   Yes, meaning that you can use web technologies to write a functional application and for it to be deployed through the native app stores. It doesn't mean an app can simply be copied from a hosted web server into a cordova container and for it to work out the box. For simple applications this may work, but for most applications this you probably won't get very far without writing many cordova-app specific code.
   
   > Lastly, do you know of any plugins/competing technologies that may handle route translation on the device side? 
   
   No I'm not aware of any plugins. if you use the History API to fake the url path for a particular route, if the webview tries to reload that page it will fail. That's why hash-bash routing is recommended for Cordova apps, so the filepath can remain as your main/physical index.html file. There is no "server side logic" when it comes to serving HTML in cordova apps.
   
   Last tid bit of insider knowledge... it hasn't been announced on our blog yet, but the Windows platform (as well as OSX) are both going to become deprecated with the electron platform as it's replacement -- but I don't think electron platform has a solution that you're looking for either unfortunately.
   
   Edit: I guess the electron platform does have scheme support provided in https://github.com/apache/cordova-electron/pull/154


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