Re: [W3C Webmob] PhoneGap Plugins

On December 23, 2014 at 12:01:13 AM, Leandro Melo de Sales (leandro@ic.ufal.br) wrote:
> > I understood the basic mission for the charter. Is there any  
> strategy/plan on how to keep tracking/monitoring of the new  
> apis that become available in each well-know platforms (e.g.  
> ios, android, blackberry, wp, tizen, firefox-os, ubuntu-mobile)? 

The approach is more focused on what use cases are being enabled (and hence not available on the Web platform), not so much on APIs. Getting into an "API arms" race with proprietary platforms wouldn't end well. 

> this seems to be a very time-consuming task and it is necessary  
> to define a plan here. This seems to be a great effort and one simple  
> suggestion is to build an online tool where the developers can  
> point out feature requests and at least describe the basics for  
> a desired API that they want to see in the web platform. 

Yes, exactly. We have a number of forums for that. For example:

http://discourse.specifiction.org

And the various browser vendors run their own. 

The deliverables of this group have been mostly driven by problems browser vendors are trying to solve in collaboration with mobile carriers, OS makers, and hardware manufacturers.  
 

> Surely,  
> we can think about other strategies for this, such as define a  
> set of researchers interested in contribute in this field and  
> make each of them responsible for each known platform and them  
> try to officially (via W3C) communicate with the stakeholders  
> of the respective company to try to make the task of monitoring  
> the APIs (new and changes in the existing ones) easier. I don't  
> know if this is still in the scope of the charter and if what I'm  
> talking about makes sense for you.

Again, I don't think the APIs matter. What is use cases are enabled does matter, however.   

> For now, I'm interested in all mobile platform and try to enable  
> basic functions via cordova plugin that are not support in some  
> platform. This is allowing me to understand that as an isolate  
> effort it is very difficult to find points of contributions that  
> it will provide a good impact in the community. For example, we  
> start to research important plugins available in cordova that  
> are not supported BlackBerry 10 yet and this is not a simple task.  
> Anyway, as far as I'm understand the scope for the charter, we  
> want to find interesting APIs where we can recommend to become  
> part of the (mobile) web platform, am I correct?

Again, think of them as interesting use cases, which we then can realize as either an API, or new HTML element, or maybe something else entirely.

Received on Tuesday, 23 December 2014 00:46:51 UTC