Re: A simpler, webbier approach to Web Intents?

On 16/02/2012 2:35 PM, Ben Adida wrote:
>
> Hi folks,
>
> I wanted to follow up on the post I wrote about finding a simpler
> approach to Web Intents [1].
>
> Looking at the latest posts, I see the following from James:
>
>> One of the design goals of Web Intents was to eventually replace the
>> functionality of RPH/RCH in a simpler, more intuitive fashion. This also
>> means eventually deprecating those methods to have a consistent API.

Just incase people haven't seen this and need yet more grist for the 
mill, there is a new post to the WHATWG list from James Hawkins - 
"Proposal: Deprecate registerProtocolHandler/registerContentHandler via 
Web Intents"

http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2012-February/034881.html

Mark

>
> I'm confused by this, as it seems to be backwards. Replacing
> functionality in web browsers is quasi-impossible. Shouldn't we,
> instead, be thinking about how to tweak existing functionality to
> encompass new use cases? That seems like a much safer approach.
>
> On my blog, Greg points to a number of long-standing discussions about
> RPH. None of these discussions, as best as I can tell, make a solid
> argument that we have clear use cases that cannot be fulfilled with a
> simpler approach like RPH. Heck, even my arguments from September are
> about overall aesthetics, not very well backed by use cases.
>
> Looking at the FAQ on webintents.org, the following arguments are provided:
>
>> We don't think this goes quite far enough, the protocol handlers have
>> no concept of what data will be presented to the launched
>> application; what happens when the opened application can't handle
>> the data?
>
> First, I'm not entirely convinced that this is a big problem. We might
> want sharing links to be different from sharing images, in which case
> different schemes could be considered.
>
>> how do you send an image to an app?
>
> postMessage some data.
>
>> There is no way to communicate data back to the calling application.
>
> postMessage back to the caller.
>
> Am I missing something? Very little of this seems particularly hard,
> which makes me lean towards using what we already have.
>
> -Ben
>
> [1]
> http://benlog.com/articles/2012/02/09/a-simpler-webbier-approach-to-web-intents-or-activities/
>
>

Received on Thursday, 16 February 2012 05:14:59 UTC