Web Intents - Fourth Parties (part 5)

Web Intents - Fourth Parties (part 5)

There are three main parties involved in the Actions I've described:
1. The User Agent / User
2. The Client / Page requesting an Action
3. The Partner / Provider that will respond to the Action

I'd like to suggest possible Fourth parties for a moment:
§11 Filter/Transform Actions
§12 Reputation Providers

§11 Filter/Transform Actions

I think we're going to want to encourage vendors to produce and offer
Filter/Transform Actions.

To use my Printing examples, anything that offers Print to File is a
Transform from <Print> to <Save>*. These can be used to address
certain problems. Note that while some of these appear to just be
Previewing tools (ala §7), most actually allow Editing (highlighting,
rotation, re-sequencing, cutting, saving, etc.).

§12 Reputation Providers

Clients/Providers will often be dealing with confidential + valuable
data.As such, users could probably benefit from unaffiliated
reputation providers who can review both Client Pages and Provider
Partners.

I've tried to avoid suggesting implementations for anything in these messages...

I don't think a Reputation Provider will be a CA [1]. Ideally, it
probably should be a BBB [2], however better business bureaus haven't
ported well to the Web World (not to pick on anyone in particular, the
Credit Card vendors seals of approval [3] are useless and sometimes
dangerously broken [4] and the same applies to the CAs [5][6]).

Some real world groups, such as AAA [7], which does Hotel+Travel
ratings [8] and Consumer Reports [9] have a token presence, and I'd
like to highlight what I like about them: They provide a rating scale
and comments (justifying ratings).

There have been some attempts at web ratings of late, WoT [10] comes
to mind. There are of course Anti-virus vendor sponsored efforts [11].
Unfortunately there are also Fake AVs [12] so it's likely there would
be similar sites if this space develops.

In today's world, most Browser UAs use Malware stop lists (e.g. Safe
Browsing [13] and SmartScreen [14]). They are integrated into most
Desktop UAs. Unfortunately Mobile UAs have tended not to get this
stuff due to space, resource, privacy and other considerations†.

In short, this should probably be designed for, but it might be OK for
this to be added later (as was the case for Malware). Specifications
could easily not require any hooks relating to Reputation Providers,
but it might be good for them to have potential suggestions for where
they could be integrated (although, perhaps the integration point will
be obvious). In some ways, selecting a Partner Provider is like going
to a Store, and most web stores have ratings and comments.

* Printing to File transforms: Adobe Distiller [15], Microsoft XPS
Document Writer [16][17], PostScript save to file [18], and Apple's
Preview.app [19].
† Or at least as quickly [20].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_authority
[2] http://www.bbb.org
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-D_Secure
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3-D_Secure#Criticism
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_authority#Domain_Validation
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certificate_authority#Subversion_of_CA
[7] http://www.aaa.com
[8] http://ww2.aaa.com/aaa/common/Tourbook/diamonds/whatisthis.html
[9] http://www.consumerreports.org
[10] http://www.mywot.com
[11] http://www.siteadvisor.com
[12] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rogue_security_software
[13] http://code.google.com/apis/safebrowsing
[14] http://windowsteamblog.com/windows_live/b/windowslive/archive/2010/03/12/getting-a-reputation-how-smartscreen-looks-at-urls.aspx
[15] http://www.citationsoftware.com/faqDistiller.htm
[16] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/dd145058%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
[17] http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-vista/Print-to-the-Microsoft-XPS-Document-Writer
[18] http://www.hawaii.edu/askus/637[19]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preview_(Mac_OS)
[20] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=470876#c1

Received on Tuesday, 22 November 2011 23:23:20 UTC