Re: user assigned names for services

On Thu, 24 Nov 2011 11:23:16 +0100, Dave Raggett <dsr@w3.org> wrote:

> It is worth looking at multiscreen use cases where the user is seeking
> to display some content, perhaps a video on one or more screens, e.g.
> you may have a connected TV in your bedroom, and your living room (aka
> lounge). These devices can be discovered via zeroconf or UPnP and
> registered by the web run-time, but the interesting question is how
> users identify the different screens, especially if they are the same
> model of device.
[...]
> You could argue that this is something for the web run-times to deal
> with, and not exposed by the web intents API. However, is that always
> the case? I suspect that users and developers will want a way for
> applications to make use of names for particular services, so that an
> application can request a binding for an intent to a named service. This
> has the corollary that applications can access the name of a service
> after the user has bound the intent.
>

I think that what an application needs to know is different from what a  
user needs to know.
An application is interested in services: "I want a service to play  
content" while a user thinks about devices: "the TV in my bedroom".

That said, in theory you could provide all the info (service and device)  
to the application and let the application show these info to the user,  
but then you will hit all sort of issues like:

- privacy (e.g. fingerprinting, marketing profiling)
- security (if I know which device I'm talking to, I may be able exploit  
known vulnerabilities)
- user experience/phishing (if you let the application show device  
information, you have a different user experience on each application and  
this will confuse the user)

So the mapping between a generic service and a specific device needs to be  
handled by the UA in a controlled way (and also in a way that is familiar  
and understandable to the user).

I realize there are ecosystems where there is no browser chrome, all you  
have is a kind of fullscreen browser and you want to build your UI using  
html/js/css.
I'm wondering though if this scenario should be handled separately (by a  
different spec/group) given that use cases and security implications are  
different.

/g


-- 
Giuseppe Pascale
TV & Connected Devices
Opera Software

Received on Friday, 25 November 2011 08:11:00 UTC