New approach to activities/intents

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. 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/

Received on Monday, 3 November 2014 16:43:29 UTC