Re: Fwd: [whatwg] New approach to activities/intents

On 11/07/2014 07:43 PM, Dan Brickley wrote:
> Forwarding from the WHATWG list and nearby. Maybe some tie-in with
> http://schema.org/ShareAction etc. ?
http://schema.org/ShareAction looks like an interesting case to take a
closer look at!

Currently 2 examples only show use of it as *past activity* and not used
together with *potentialAction*.

So far I have impression that http://schema.org/docs/actions.html
focuses on somehow simplified use cases with only two parties involved:

1. User Agent (web browser) acting as client
2. Web Service acting as server

In Social WG we look at interaction among more parties and I think
ShareAction (also build into browser) would need that as well. To give
an example of more then two parties (sorry for using bit random
terminology):

1. User Agent (web browser) acting as client
2. *Domestic* Web Service (aka. *MY* Personal Cloud) acting as server
3. *Foreign* Web Service (eg. magazine) acting as server with 1 and as
client with 2 and 3
4. *Foreign* Web Service (eg. groupware) acting as server with 1 and as
client with 2 and 3

Scenario: I navigate to an article published by online magazine (3). My
browser supports Share action. Similar to Bookmark, content provider
doesn't even need to advertise such affordance since this action could,
but doesn't need to change it's state! My personal online profile,
hosted on my 'domestic web service' (2) and interests group hosted by
one of 'foreign servers' both advertise themselves *as recipients* for
'ShareAction'. Browser also can fetch from my personal cloud (1) list of
all my saved resources, for example selecting only resources of type
'sioct:MessageBoard', which advertised affordance to act recipients for
ShareAction. In Share UI I select my personal profile (1) and one of
interest groups i participate in (4) as 2 recipients of this action.
Since online magazine (3) also happened to advertise support for
notifications when using it *as object* of ShareAction, I also can check
option to notify content provider (3) about sharing its content in two
places (2  4), this way it can update its counters and provide link to
its content syndicated elsewhere.

WebMention, one of the submissions to Social WG from IndieWebCamp,
provides basic notification mechanism which this scenario could use.
http://webmention.org - "It’s a modern alternative to Pingback and other
forms of Linkback."

In most use cases that we work with in Social WG, we have at least 3
parties participating in interaction - 1 user agent and 2 web services
(domestic & foreign). For example if I comment on something, the actual
comment would first get published on my *domestic* web service and then
syndicated with the *foreign* web service which hosts the resource used
as object in that CommentAction. We haven't discussed yet pros&cons of
user agent notifying *foreign* service directly or leaving this
responsibility to domestic web service.

Even if you remove domestic service from my example above, you will
still have 1 user agent and 2 web services participating in the interaction!

I hope I didn't side track to much, I just have strong impression that
Schema.org, Browser Vendors and Social WG may all have little different
perspective on online Actions and need to address different set of use
cases, which of course have also significant overlap!

One of my recent mails IMO very relevant to such *multi target* actions:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-vocabs/2014Nov/0045.html

Cheers!


> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: Anne van Kesteren <annevk@annevk.nl>
> Date: 3 November 2014 16:42
> Subject: [whatwg] New approach to activities/intents
> To: WHATWG <whatwg@whatwg.org>
> 
> 
> A couple of us at Mozilla have been trying to figure out how to revive
> activities/intents for the web. Both work relatively well in closed
> environments such as Firefox OS and Android, but seem harder to deploy
> in a generic way on the web.
> 
> What we've been looking at instead is solving a smaller use case. A
> Sharing API to start and then hopefully reuse the building blocks for
> other features that need to be liberated.
> 
> https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Sharing/API has a sketch for what a very
> minimal Sharing API could look like.
> 
> Our thinking is that something like the overlay browsing context could
> be reused to make e.g. <input type=file> or "save as" extensible going
> forward.
> 
> However, admittedly it still doesn't really click. It feels a bit too
> much like e.g. the various search extensions browsers offer. Too much
> work for little return. Furthermore, freeing the web somehow from
> closely knitted silos seems like a worthwhile goal, but is often
> counter to what those silos are interested in. So it might be that
> we're still not quite there yet, thoughts appreciated.
> 
> (I put WebApps and TAG on bcc, hope that's okay.)
> 
> 
> --
> https://annevankesteren.nl/
>

Received on Monday, 10 November 2014 13:40:38 UTC