New View Mode: docked

Hi,

The View Modes spec currently conflates the idea of a minimised and a  
docked application. Opera has a concrete use case for extending the spec  
to add a "docked" View mode which is seperate, and we have seen another  
one in usage.

1. Extensions / Speed Dial Extensions (concrete requirement):

Opera's Speed Dial Extensions are pretty much minimised applications,  
running in a small region, but still providing the app with full control  
over the rendering, via HTML/CSS/SVG/etc etc. By contrast, when an  
extension is on a toolbar, it gets an icon and a short text "badge", both  
of which can be changed, but it does not have a real rendering surface.

We are looking to extend the functionality of our extensions platform,  
still basing it on the widget standards including View Mode, but we really  
need to have this distinction. We could implement it anyway (and probably  
will), but it would be useful to have it as part of the standard stack.

2. Minimised widgets and widget managers (requirement we have seen):

(This is something we currently have no concrete need to support, but have  
seen from our experience with our widgets implementations)

It is actually quite common for an application to have a "minimised"  
version. Media players have been doing this for many years, as have  
information widgets like news readers, sports scoreboards and the like.  
Again, this provides a smaller but fully-controlled rendering surface.  
Meanwhile, widget managers (a la application managers like the "taskbar"  
common to graphical operating systems) use an iconified representation  
which may provide some, but highly restricted, ability for the app to  
render information.

whaddayasallreckon?

cheers

-- 
Charles 'chaals' McCathieNevile  Opera Software, Standards Group
     je parle français -- hablo español -- jeg kan noen norsk
http://my.opera.com/chaals       Try Opera: http://www.opera.com

Received on Friday, 11 May 2012 10:07:59 UTC