Re: Bjartur's Actual Criticism (finally)

Bjartur wrote:
> My understanding was that sites are responsible for showing the picker
> interface for users to select actions. That is what I oppose.

No. We do not intend for this to be the case, the intent broker (the
UA) will manage the picker interface.

> If a user wants to have "bookmark this" and "post to reddit" buttons in a
> certain place, should he modify his UA to expose a bookmarking API to all
> websites, email authors of all websites he may read and ask them to add
> both "bookmark this" and "post to reddit" to the place of choice in
> disregard for the preferences of other readers of the websites.

Modifying UAs is the realm of extensions. We expect that some UAs
which have support for extensions will include APIs which enable
extensions to participate in Intents and thus this will magically
happen. Users are free to vote with their feet and migrate to UAs
which make this portion easier. We can't make this a requirement. But
as a matter of competition (QoI), the right thing should happen.

> I don't want any buttons visible while I'm reading text or watching
> pictures. I've got a menu button for when I need them. Another user might
> want buttons to appear when he has scrolled through all the page. A third
> user on a wide screen might want a load of always-visible buttons in a
> sidebar.

We can't prevent sites from being stupid or annoying. And for sites
trying to support older UAs, there will be cases where sites will want
to expose buttons. They may stop doing them for certain actions if
enough UAs offer a given intent natively, but that's really up to the
site, and specific to a given intent. For things like <Print>, which
in theory is a natively supported Action, sites have had specific
print buttons anyway, the reason for this is that sites mostly suck
and don't have proper CSS style sheets for @media print, and would
rather be involved in the experience. We can't prevent this, not for
printing, and not for Intents.

> The code that places and shows buttons has to be reused, so device makers
> can optimize it for their input and output devices and users configure it
> to their liking.

Sites have random layouts, they tend to evolve in competition with
similar sites. Users can deal with this evolution, and they are
involved in that when they vote with their feet in favor of a layout
they like, the losers will evolve to match, improve, or die. Darwinian
theory.

Received on Friday, 23 December 2011 01:21:45 UTC