Re: Mapping WebIntents to Network Service Discovery API

On Mon, Jan 9, 2012 at 12:53 PM,  <Cathy.Chan@nokia.com> wrote:
> [...]
> Actually, that makes it a rather different use case than what I believe the
> UPnP-minded folks have in mind. We should consider the UPnP devices as legacy
> devices with no web capabilities whatsoever. (They use HTTP etc. but in a
> predefined manner.) I would imagine the UA, or an extension to the UA, to act
> as a bridge between the UPnP protocols and the web protocols, but I doubt if
> the UA/extension would go so far as serving up a full-blown web based service
> including the progress/animation/status/ads/whatever you pictured in 5b.

I wrote up an approach to UPnP device interaction here [1]. It takes
the approach that
while it may be the province of the User Agent to speak UPnP, Web
Intents should not
attempt to be a bridge protocol between UPnP and web content. There
are quite a few
use cases that can be solved in this way, but there are some that are
much trickier,
if not impossible. Whether that means Web Intents is a poor match for
what web content
might want to do with UPnP devices I'm not sure. I don't have a good
handle on the
relative qualities of the use cases.



> So, basically we have two different schools of thoughts here. One is that the
> Site only needs to know about the high-level actions such as share and print,
> and things like UPnP is just the low-level way of accomplishing that
> [typically one-off] task, and that the Site doesn't care whether it's UPnP or
> AppleTalk or whatever - just print the page. The other is that the Site is
> fully aware of and even designed for using UPnP to engage in a longer-term
> relationship with a UPnP device. Imagine a Site that lets you control your
> UPnP Blu-ray player. It needs feedback from the player (e.g. through events)
> to be able to show you the current playback position or enable/disable the
> play/pause button based on the current playback status.

This is a great phrasing of the crux. Thanks! I currently come down
wanting UPnP to
remain the province of the User Agent, but that's partly because I don't have a
good grasp on what the eventing properties are that would need to be
implemented,
and what functionality they'd enable. One thing I'm missing is a good delta
understanding between the Web Intents proposal as we currently have it
written up
(at [2]) and a version of Web Intents that fully bridged UPnP. What
would that look
like? Or will it fit into the existing API somehow? If so, how?

[1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-web-intents/2011Dec/0043.html
[2] http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/web-intents/raw-file/tip/spec/Overview.html

Received on Tuesday, 10 January 2012 01:09:24 UTC