Re: Is there an existing mechanism that can be used for WebIntents?

On Tue, Jan 24, 2012 at 12:23 PM, Robin Berjon <robin@berjon.com> wrote:

> Hi Rich,
>
> On Jan 24, 2012, at 12:35 , Rich Tibbett wrote:
> > Robin Berjon wrote:
> >> With WI you have a type of object (e.g. contacts) and actions you can
> perform on it (e.g. save, pick, edit, delete). Architecturally this is
> rather similar to how the Web is designed. If I understand Rich's RPH.next
> proposal, we'd replace that with web+contactssave, web+contactspick,
> web+contactsedit, web+contactsdelete and so on (or did I miss something?).
> That seems quite different from the Web's architecture as it stands; it
> would be more like having httpget, httppost, httpput, httpdelete, etc.
> depending on the expected action.
> >
> > Actually the proposal allows you to just define web+contacts and then
> HTTP PUT, POST, GET, DELETE against it. Separating the actions in to their
> own 'protocols' would be entirely possible but probably wouldn't be best
> practice.
>
> So you're limited to HTTP verbs. How do you capture the difference between
> view and pick? How do you capture edit? How do you capture new for that
> matter? More generally, how do you avoid overloading HTTP's semantics?
>
>
HTTP's semantics are meant to be layered on top of this way.. hence why
POST is used to send emails, complete transactions, upload images, etc.

HTTP's semantics are generalised so that intermediaries on the network can
have an understanding of what is going on with an interaction (in network
terms) but without having to understand the actual semantics of the
application that is driving the interaction. Provided the specific
semantics of your application don't conflict with HTTP's constraints,
there's no issue.

Cheers,
Mike