Re: New View Mode: docked

On 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.


Sounds reasonable. I was also wondering recently how a widget could work under a Metro-based WRT, which seems quite a similar UC.

> 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.

We have minimised widgets in Apache Rave (a white-label social portal app that runs both W3C Widgets and OpenSocial) however in that case its handled by the portal framework by just hiding the widget iframe div rather than providing a special iconified version. That again sounds a lot more like a Metro-style app so I can see a potential UC.

Incidentally, we haven't implemented view modes as we don't operate at a level of the browser stack where we can really use them - I think one of the early drafts of the spec provided some events, but other than that I don't know how projects like Apache Rave and Apache Wookie could implement them.

S

> 
> 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 16:33:10 UTC