RE: [contacts] HTML Contact Sharing

Hi Richard,

Generally I like the idea of creating simple APIs based on HTML elements. As far as I understand your intention is to provide a simpler alternative for developers than the JS Contacts API. This HTML API will be usable for some use cases.

Comparing with the Firefox demo implementation of the JS API I assume that the use case covered by the HTML Contact API is the “Use Contacts to Personalize This Page” case. The “e-mail autocompletion” use cases wouldn’t be possible to implement with the “Device-element” as a “selector”-button is required. Correct?

Furthermore, in your example in Appendix A I miss user consent for approving the operation.

Regards
  Claes

From: public-device-apis-request@w3.org [mailto:public-device-apis-request@w3.org] On Behalf Of Rich Tibbett
Sent: den 22 september 2010 02:20
To: public-device-apis@w3.org
Subject: [contacts] HTML Contact Sharing

I've uploaded a new proposal that defines HTML enhancements to provide access to a user's address book data. The first draft can be viewed here:

  http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/contacts/HTML.html


This draft is up for discussion - it does not assume consensus on the material at this point.

The proposal is based on HTML Device [1] and reuses the basic security and privacy principles and existing low-level parts of the programmatic Contacts API [2] to provide address book data to a web application.

We chose to build atop of the device element for a number of reasons, primarily because:

- unknown/unimplemented HTML input elements degrade to a text field which isn't an intuitive user experience if the feature is not supported in the user's current browser.

- the HTML device element is not a form-based element. That isn't the primary intention of it's use to obtain contact information. Having said that ...

- the HTML device element's data attribute can be serialized quite nicely (in a JSON.stringify like manner) for transmission via web forms if it needed to be and then deserialized (in a JSON.parse like manner) at the other end as required. Whether the device element could/should provide serialization guidelines is a matter for the WHATWG to decide in [1]. (in the HTML Contact Sharing spec a note has been added to this effect). For example, the device element's value attribute could be set to the stringified value of the data attribute to allow for standard web form submission and parsing on the server-side.

This proposal is an early draft and will be developed going forward.

The intention is for both the programmatic model in [2] and the HTML-based model to co-exist within a conforming user agent, allowing a web developer to choose the most suitable mechanism according to their application's needs and to allow either model to function with the aid of a common user interface/experience, contact storage and format.

All feedback is welcome and will be taken onboard in order to create the most compelling integration model we can. As always,

- Rich

[1] http://dev.w3.org/html5/html-device/

[2] http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/contacts/Overview.html