Re: Adding Web Intents to the Webapps WG deliverables

On Sun, 25 Sep 2011, John J Barton wrote:
> On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 2:36 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> > There's no difference between two people coming up with the name "foo" 
> > and two people coming up with the name "http://webintents.org/foo", 
> > unless you're saying you're confident that people won't use the prefix 
> > the spec uses for its verbs for their verbs.
> 
> I don't think this claim makes sense. As a developer I have no way to 
> know if 'foo' is used by anyone else on the Internet, but it would be 
> trivial to check "http://webintents.org/foo".

How would you check if I'm using http://webintents.org/foo?


> > But this is a non-problem. In practice, we have plenty of examples of 
> > spaces where conflicts don't happen despite not having used long names 
> > such as URLs. For example:
> >
> >  - rel="" values in HTML
> >  - element names in HTML
> >  - MIME type names
> >  - scheme names
> 
> I believe all of these examples have one or more central name controls.  
> The rel example in particular provides a counter example to using simple 
> uncontrolled verbs: http://microformats.org/wiki/existing-rel-values 
> Multiple naming authorities, layered on wiki, and still messy.

Why are they more messy than DNS?


> >> A verb on its own will imply that it is a web intents verb managed by 
> >> the webintents project and all the documentation for that will live 
> >> under webintents, which means we would then need to think about 
> >> standardisation and stewardship for the entire namespace.
> >
> > I don't see why. Just have a wiki page that people can list their 
> > verbs on and then point to their documentation.
> 
> A wiki is not comparable to the controlled naming systems in the four 
> examples you give above.

rel="" uses a wiki. Element names uses nothing at all; anyone can invent a 
new one, there's no central authority.


> A wiki is a free for all that works great when there is no money 
> involved. A Web system involving 'share' along with images, audio, and 
> video will have money involved.

I don't see why having money involved will make any difference. Could you 
elaborate? Why has this problem not occured with element names or rel="" 
values?

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'