Re: [whatwg] New approach to activities/intents

On Fri, Nov 7, 2014 at 10:43 AM, Dan Brickley <danbri@google.com> wrote:

> Forwarding from the WHATWG list and nearby. Maybe some tie-in with
> http://schema.org/ShareAction etc. ?
>
> Dan
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Anne van Kesteren <annevk@annevk.nl>
> Date: 3 November 2014 16:42
> Subject: [whatwg] New approach to activities/intents
> To: WHATWG <whatwg@whatwg.org>
>
>
> A couple of us at Mozilla have been trying to figure out how to revive
> activities/intents for the web. Both work relatively well in closed
> environments such as Firefox OS and Android, but seem harder to deploy
> in a generic way on the web.
>
> What we've been looking at instead is solving a smaller use case. A
> Sharing API to start and then hopefully reuse the building blocks for
> other features that need to be liberated.
>
> https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Sharing/API has a sketch for what a very
> minimal Sharing API could look like.
>
> Our thinking is that something like the overlay browsing context could
> be reused to make e.g. <input type=file> or "save as" extensible going
> forward.
>
> However, admittedly it still doesn't really click. It feels a bit too
> much like e.g. the various search extensions browsers offer. Too much
> work for little return.


I think she gets the problem: the registry can't be the browser. You need a
global registry.

That's why I think something like semantics (e.g. SearchAction
<https://developers.google.com/webmasters/richsnippets/sitelinkssearch>,
ShareAction
<http://blog.sgo.to/2014/09/schemaorg-actions-implementations.html>,
ListenAction
<http://insidesearch.blogspot.com/2014/06/find-music-on-google-and-start-playing.html>)
+ web pages + crawlers have a better chance than local registries.

I think Yandex Islands is taking this even further to cover unstructured
forms <http://beta.yandex.com/>.


> Furthermore, freeing the web somehow from
> closely knitted silos seems like a worthwhile goal, but is often
> counter to what those silos are interested in. So it might be that
> we're still not quite there yet, thoughts appreciated.
>
> (I put WebApps and TAG on bcc, hope that's okay.)
>
>
> --
> https://annevankesteren.nl/
>