Can we replace some/all sim variants with query parameters?

[samreid]

Discovered in phetsims/circuit-construction-kit-common#777. CCK has a lot of extra overhead from having separate sims for the "virtual lab" variants. This introduces 2 extra repos which need to be maintained, released, patched, etc. From an engineering standpoint, it seems preferable to publish one sim and add a ?virtualLab query parameter. We could also benefit from this approach in beers-law-lab & concentration, and cases like that.

Places where we would need support:

• How would downloads work? Would we output a different artifact that has the query parameter "baked in"?
• Website would need to be updated to point to the different build artifacts.
• How would we deal with legacy publications?

Would this be worth the added complexity? Tagging for dev meeting discussion, but also labeling as epic since if we agree to work on it, it would be epic-level effort.

[zepumph]

Discussed at dev meeting today:

This would be awesome for:

• This would be a nice improvement for all of our "suites" of sims.
• This would greatly simplify maintenance releases

Some issues with this approach:

• The website isn't set up to have multiple "sims" use the same link, but with different query parameters.
• We are optimizing our HTML sims to be easy download and run. There wouldn't be an easy way to embed a query parameter for this runnable. We could update the grunt process to create different artifacts for each version.
• Yotta would need to be updated to support this.
• Cans of worms for PhET-iO, how to we handle the API for sims?
• This would make the sims bigger, especially bundling all images into them.

@jonathanolson: This was the java approach, and we didn't continue with this into HTML for a reason.
@pixelzoom: With these "flavors", we couldn't version them separately, it was all or nothing. It didn't match the view of the products that users have.

All devs, please note in this issue over the next year any pain points you experience related to this, and we will see if these costs are worth this effort.