Re: Web Intents/Web Activities F2F get-together report

(+public-webapps; I apologize, I thought I'd included that list yesterday)

Yes, I think discussions on this list would be helpful. I think the F2F
time is probably better spent elsewhere in June; that's a bit of projection
about how much we can learn in the meantime. We're very interested in the
Web Activities launch -- that'll teach us a lot.


On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 8:01 AM, <Frederick.Hirsch@nokia.com> wrote:

>  Greg
>
>  Thanks for the report, and thanks to you Darin, Jonas and Mounir for
> meeting.
>
>  I assume that this means we will (1) continue with some deeper
> discussions and proposals on this list and (2) that we can and should
> reserve time (e.g. a day or 1 1/2 days) in the DAP F2F agenda 4-6 June for
> this topic [1].
>
>  Are these both correct assumptions?
>
>  Perhaps it would make sense to pick a topic to share more details on the
> list to get some discussion started - I assume the uni-directional approach
> is a good place to start. It might help to summarize the flow, and the
>  implications of this change on the functionality and user experience. In
> addition, Mounir, is it possible for you to share more on the list about
> this topic from the Firefox OS point of view?
>
>  Thanks
>
>    regards, Frederick
>
>  Frederick Hirsch, Nokia
> Chair, W3C DAP Working Group
>
>   [1] DAP F2F to be held in Düsseldorf, Germany 4-6 June 2013.
>
>  On Mar 21, 2013, at 4:43 PM, ext Greg Billock wrote:
>
>  Chrome (Greg Billock and Darin Fisher) and Mozilla (Jonas Sicking and
> Mounir Lamouri) folks got together recently to talk about Web Intents/Web
> Activities, and exchange information and ideas. Here's a summary, and some
> food for thought about a direction forward:
>
>  1. We spent quite a bit of time discussing the issues with the Chrome
> Web Intents experimental implementation that we discussed in TPAC -- the
> difficulty of indicating cross-tab coordination and the state of that
> coordination, difficulties with bidirectional communication given two
> communicating contexts, etc. FirefoxOS is not dealing with a lot of these
> issues with Web Activities -- the handler contexts tend to be
> system-originated and replace existing UI.
>
>  2. We discussed ways to address these problems. The most promising soun
> like limiting handlers to inline-only and/or restricting communication to
> unidirectional-only. This handles many use cases and may provide a way to
> ease some of the UI constraints. A possible direction is to enable
> bi-directional communication through including a target URL in the
> unidirectional invocation, such that the target is able to invoke to, for
> example, save an edited document.
>
>  3. We discussed switching the governance of the disposition such that
> the client always controls the disposition context. That is, source pages
> would control whether the handler ran inline or in another
> tabbed/overlapped context. This seems like a promising change -- it reduces
> the unpredictability of the UI for clients. There's a question as to how
> much disposition negotiation could occur that would need to be resolved.
> This also allows a path to another embed-like disposition which acts more
> like a plug-in.
>
>  4. We spent time talking about the right context in which to handle
> invocations in a reduced scope -- should this be analogous to a shared
> worker? But those don't have access to any DOM. Should they be analogous to
> Chrome's event pages? Having a DOM is convenient, but is that convenience
> worth the cost?
>
>  5. There's a possible ramp-up opportunity where we start with
> inline/unidirectional data flow and see how far that takes us. Some of
> these ideas give us confidence we're not trapped, and we can perhaps ease
> our way past the most challenging UI problems. This direction is pretty
> much the scope of what Mozilla is doing with Firefox OS, so we hope to
> learn a lot from that.
>
>
>