Re: New View Mode: docked

On Friday, 11 May 2012 at 11:07, Charles McCathieNevile wrote:

> 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.

Sure, it's trivial to define a "badge" mode. The problem is that both views can be present simultaneously - or two documents are being presented out of the same widget at the same time (better, IMO). This means that the view mode model might be wrong as it applies to individual documents and not to the widget itself. 
 
> 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?
> 

I guess the above applies here too.  

-- 
Marcos Caceres
http://datadriven.com.au

Received on Friday, 11 May 2012 14:07:47 UTC