Re: A question about action matching

Hi

I've been thinking this for some time and got several simple ideas.

It seems the spec draft has not *required* (only recommended) that the
developer should use a fully qualified URI for the action string. I think
the currently action can be broken down into three parts:

protocol, domain name, real action words

Taking http://webintents.org/edit for example, above three parts are http,
webintent.org and edit. Among them I think "edit" may take the main
semantic part because what the developer really want to invoke might be an
"edit" service.

In android the intent action is composed of package name and action words.
For example in 'android.intent.action.EDIT", edit may represent the major
intent of the user.

I agree with Greg that the UA should be responsible for the translation
part. I was just thinking fully qualification URI for intent invocation
might not very good if the number of intent grows up. For example, is the
user more preferable to using simple phrase like "EDIT", or "hotel
reservation" to invoke intents instead? The process is very similar as what
we use search engines for searching web pages by a simple bag of words.

As a conclusion, I think exact matching for the action string might not
have a good scalability to potentially huge amounts of intent action on the
web. For example, Twitter might more prefer to registering by the intent of
"https://twitter.com/share", and the developer would like to use "share" as
a generic action invocation. In that case semantic matching may be more
appropriate than exact matching.

On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 10:37 AM, Greg Billock <gbillock@google.com> wrote:

> It'd be the responsibility of the UA to translate intents into any
> kind of system-level construct, including any kind of mapping like
> this. Windows 8 contracts are another similar system to and from which
> translation is likely possible.
>
>
> On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 12:56 AM, Friedger Müffke
> <friedger@googlemail.com> wrote:
> > That sounds like allowing some kind of alias for an action. I don't
> > think that will work or is intended.
> > If an Android app wants to take part in the web intents game a
> > one-to-one translation has to be done by the user agent such that
> > "android.intent.action.EDIT" is translated into the semantically equal
> > string "http://webintents.org/edit"
> >
> > Friedger
> >
> >
>
>