Re: <device> proposal (for video conferencing, etc)

On Wed, 16 Dec 2009, Kenton Varda wrote:
> 
> Fundamentally I have no problem with the "author-supplied APIs" being 
> limited to RESTful APIs over HTTP (rather than arbitrary Javascript 
> interfaces).  What I'm interested in here is the ability to use this UI 
> as a way to "hook up" apps.  Currently we don't have a good way for one 
> site to say "I provide an object of type X!" while another site says "I 
> can use an object of type X!", and then let the user choose to connect 
> the two in a secure way.  In practice, either the latter site has to be 
> hard-coded to talk to the former, or the user has to copy-paste some 
> sort of URL-plus-security-token from one to the other.  I think the UI 
> you're imagining for device selection is also a good UI for forming 
> these kinds of hook-ups, so I was hoping they could share work, instead 
> of having to solve the same problem twice.
> 
> If there's a way to do this sort of thing with existing standards that I 
> don't know about, please point me in the right direction.

You can do this with HTML5-era technologies in at least two ways: an 
<iframe> to a site that provides a postMessage() API, and a WebSocket to 
the site that provides a WebSocket protocol. Both can be done with "just" 
a URL (much like OpenID).


> > What would you suggest instead of ".data"?
> 
> Maybe ".object"?  I don't know what words are already reserved.

"object" is a reserved word in WebIDL, so it would be better to avoid it. 
Also everything's an object, so it's even vaguer than "data"! :-) I'll 
ponder the issue, however. Maybe "selection", or some such.

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

Received on Thursday, 17 December 2009 06:10:58 UTC