Re: Web Intents W3C Editor's Draft 31 January 2012 - Review comments

On 3/14/2012 6:23 PM, Nilsson, Claes1 wrote:
> •         Section 3.4
>
> - Service as web worker? We can’t expect all intent handling Services to have a UI. Have you considered allowing workers? If so, an option is to allow the value “worker” for the disposition attribute in the registration markup.
>
> We've discussed this at length, and currently believe that a service needs to have a UI surface. This is something we should discuss, though, as there may be use cases for Worker handlers. (We called that "background" disposition.)
>
> Claes: I can think of a lot of use cases for Web Intents where the Service handler has no UI. One obvious example is a web application that is controlled by a sensor, e.g. an accelerometer, in a remote device. Why should such a Service have a UI surface once it has been selected by the user? However, I  am not sure that a worker is the best solution for for an "invisible" / "background" Service. A hidden iFrame might also be a solution. Most important for now is that these types of Services should be supported by the Web Intents framework.

I've brought this up before, too. I do use a hidden iframe in of my 
applications.

I've had iframe come up before as well to do a trampoline service for 
cross domain SharedWorker. Even had to do it in a Chrome extension.

I think "background" makes more sense than saying "worker". "headless" 
works too, but it's a funny word to me.
This opens up a little bit of "UI" discussion.

It seems like the UI for a page might have an icon saying that an 
"intent" is running.

When there are background intents, that icon might have numbers, or 
otherwise open to a menu of intents that are running.
When there are no background intents, it still might do the same thing. 
But with background and inline intents, a terminate option might be nice.

Google Chrome does this in Windows, with an icon in the task tray and a 
context menu with the running background apps.

-Charles

Received on Saturday, 17 March 2012 01:18:50 UTC