- From: Philip Gladstone <pgladstone@cisco.com>
- Date: Tue, 05 Jul 2011 14:40:45 -0400
- To: public-device-apis@w3.org
On 7/5/2011 8:47 AM, Dominique Hazael-Massieux wrote: > > Actually, I'm not sure that it should; the search parameter of the > find() method is defined to be used as a hint that the user agent can > use to pre-filter the list of contacts to the user. > > It is so much of a hint that the user agent could choose to ignore it if > it can't make use of it (e.g. due to implementation restrictions), or it > determines that it wouldn't make sense, etc. > > I'm puzzled -- the contents of the filter field seems undefined (syntactically), with the only example being 'Bob'. There is a note that indicates that this field is to be interpreted by the contact list provider, but this seems sufficiently vague as to be useless. It isn't clear that I (as a web application author) can find out which implementation of a contact list provider is present. Without this information, I'm not going to be able to produce the correct form of the search filter string. [Compare this with browser implementations where they identify themselves carefully so that I can build/use (admittedly ugly) cross browser libraries. I realize that the goal of this work is to eliminate (in theory) the requirement for cross browser libraries, but that is why it is important to be clear on the syntax and semantics of external APIs] In particular, would you expect "bob jones" as a filter to match "Bobby J Jones" (split into individual fields as appropriate)? How about "Jones's Greek Kabob House"? If you can't say, then I think that the specification has failed as every web author will have to implement their own filtering -- and it isn't clear that a web application can retrieve the entire contacts list anyway due to underlying provider constraints. Think about LDAP based address books (or are these out of scope?) Confused in MA Philip -- Philip Gladstone Distinguished Engineer Product Development pgladstone@cisco.com Phone: +1 978-ZEN-TOAD (+1 978 936 8623) Google: +1 978 800 1010 Ham radio: N1DQ Blog: http://wwwin-blogs.cisco.com/pgladsto/ Cisco.com - http://www.cisco.com This email may contain confidential and privileged material for the sole use of the intended recipient. Any review, use, distribution or disclosure by others is strictly prohibited. If you are not the intended recipient (or authorized to receive for the recipient), please contact the sender by reply email and delete all copies of this message. For corporate legal information go to: http://www.cisco.com/web/about/doing_business/legal/cri/index.html
Received on Tuesday, 5 July 2011 18:41:16 UTC