Re: Web Intents and Home Networking Scenarios

Claes wrote:
> I completely agree on the view that Web Intents has little to
> do with how interaction with equipment on lower levels are managed.

> However, we have to consider how much of these lower levels that
> have be a part of the user agent implementation and how much that
> could be implemented as part of external Service implementations.

> Ideally a de-coupling between the user agent and specific low level
> services discovery protocols would be preferable.

> However, that may not be possible to achieve.

I'm hoping that it will be done. And it seems that someone needs to
find someone who is actually familiar w/ UPnP and figure it out.

> I am not very familiar with UPnP but as far as I understand UPnP
> service discovery builds on receiving broadcast messages over UDP.

> So a Web Intents based Service implementation, which is a web application,

No. A web intents based service implementation shouldn't be a web application.

Something should act as a gateway which maps things in and out, but it
shouldn't be a web application.

> for a service on a device discovered through UPnP must have access
> to UDP.

> This means user agent additions or another solution,
> for example an internal web server that implements UPnP service discovery.

Yep, either an extension to the UA or another process which speaks
HTTP/WebSockets + UPnP.

> Ok, so this is an alternative to the approach that has been
> discussed before where an HTML5 MessageChannel is used for
> running a high level "TV control protocol" meaning that the
> Service selected by the user for the action="hne/list" by default
> is the target for the subsequent actions?

I hope so. I really don't want to see the MessageChannel approach.

> If I interpret your proposal correctly I get a bit confused
> as it extends the Web Intents semantics from service discovery
> to a sort of "control protocol".

> I assume that you mean that actions "hne/play" and "hne/pause"
> will not cause the UA to pop up a service selection window as
> the "default Service" was selected by action="hne/list"?

UAs will probably optimize this stuff, see example B [1] step (8a). As
well as [2] step 14. There could be ยง6 Hotswapping at some point by
the user, but otherwise the user will probably not see a selection
window.

> All above looks like a nice proposal but, if I interpret it
> correctly, this also seems changing/extending the original
> purpose with Intents.

I believe it fits more or less with what I've outlined in my articles.
And that more or less maps to what I presented at TPAC [3] (the
minutes are incomplete, we were tossing things around, so I wasn't
scribing at the time).

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web-intents/2011Nov/0011.html
[2] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web-intents/2011Dec/0013.html
[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-device-apis/2011Nov/att-0177/minutes-2011-11-03.html#item21

Received on Friday, 23 December 2011 01:25:06 UTC