- From: John J Barton <johnjbarton@johnjbarton.com>
- Date: Thu, 16 Feb 2012 18:38:14 -0800
- To: Greg Billock <gbillock@google.com>
- Cc: public-web-intents@w3.org
On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 5:56 PM, Greg Billock <gbillock@google.com> wrote: > On Thu, Feb 16, 2012 at 2:15 PM, John J Barton > <johnjbarton@johnjbarton.com> wrote: >>> We explicitly support passing any structured-cloneable type in intents >>> payload. This includes Blobs and other file-ish types, ports, and >>> esoterica not yet invented. :-) >> >> Then how do you have an advantage over postMessage() over MessageChannel? > > I was just clarifying that we do not intend to allow passing of a > narrower range of types than would be possible with postMessage in > page-to-page situations. On the one hand you claim that web-intents is better because it does not allow specifying complex communications. Then it's better because it can. I'm sure it's better, but being clear on why is important. So: In the communications layer, web-intents makes MIME data transmission simple but allows any structured-cloneable types, including those types of messages sent over postMessage. > > There are many situations, though, where it is preferable to pass MIME > types, allowing the user to use a wider range of tools to handle the > intent. Imagine invoking a local image editor, for instance, or being > able to invoke a web site with a button on your photo download > software to share a photo. > >> >> The part that is missing is how a user who wants to complete a task >> finds the web page with the corresponding <intent> tag so the service >> can be registered. >> >> Based on your description it sounds like web-intent services have some >> of the properties of bookmarks (remembered pages) and cookies (the >> page isn't explicitly what the user is saving). Is that correct? >> >> So you are counting on users to go around building up a list of useful >> services before they need them? > > > Ah, I see. Yes, that is a major issue. It is hard to address it > directly in the spec, since it isn't strictly a technological problem, > and also because we think that a lot of the task of solving it is best > left up to the user agent. We've definitely thought about it, and it > is a common concern of publishers. There's a couple features of the > draft that directly address this. > > First, using a declarative registration syntax makes developing a > registry of services a lot easier. I'm familiar with the operations of > one search engine which is capable of creating such an index, but > making that process accessible is a design goal that went into > motivating declarative registration. Additionally, leaving this > process up to the browser means that registration can be quite > light-weight, meaning users are more likely to have surfed by services > they'll use by the time they want to use them to complete an intent. > > Second, we plan on exposing registered apps in the Chrome Web Store > which provide intents functionality as a way to solve this discovery > problem. We think that since all the data is kept locally, we can do a > good job of combining server-side search for qualifying services with > the user's bookmarks in a way to have a really good chance of > surfacing good suggestions for the user. > > Third, we are contemplating a change to the draft to include the > ability for publishers/clients to include suggested services to the > picker. This is included in James Hawkins' most recent mail to WhatWG. > [1] Why wouldn't I race James to create WorldsMostAwesomeWebIntents page full of <intent> tags? Won't people be motivated to create ad supported lists? Won't users be bombarded with <intent> pages? I guess these are problems you'd love to have. > You can try this out in the current Chrome beta and developer channel, > if you're interested in seeing how we think this will work. I've seen the demo live. It's very cool; that's is why I posted my questions. > > [1] http://lists.whatwg.org/htdig.cgi/whatwg-whatwg.org/2012-February/034881.html Is this the correct reference? It seems to be some completely different and uninteresting topic. Thanks for your answers. You're convincing. jjb
Received on Friday, 17 February 2012 02:38:45 UTC