RE: Blog post for review

> Low-level stuff is hard to polyfill for general usage, but you can still
> polyfill it as a way to figure out how it needs to work. I don't believe
> any of this has been released, but I've seen several people provide APIs
> to low-level stuff by polyfilling the API and talking to a localhost
> Node service that actually carries out the action. Definitely imperfect
> and certainly not practical for deployed usage, but still valuable.

Yes, I kinda like this approach. The other option is to fallback on plugins like Flash/Silverlight/ActiveX but it restricts your possibilities very quickly. The external server approach is nicer, especially now that browsers support CORS.


> One brick that I would consider important in this is Web Intents (or
> whatever evolution thereof). It makes it possible to connect an
> arbitrary user-selected service to an application. It is useful in this
> context because a number of platform services can also be exposed as
> remote services. To take an example, an API to interact with a user's
> contacts could use an online service just as well as one provided by the
> browser to the local address book. This makes it possible to introduce
> services without browser support, but that can be enhanced by it when it
> comes.
>
> I'd like to rekindle the work that was done in that area but in an as
> trimmed-down as possible manner, possibly that can be (partially)
> polyfilled. I'm happy to discuss it here if ever there's interest.

This is certainly of interest. I wonder if the API could not be improved now that Futures are part of the platform.

Received on Wednesday, 12 June 2013 15:55:24 UTC