Re: [WARP] Use cases for local network access

On 4 Feb 2010, at 15:15, Arve Bersvendsen wrote:
On Tue, 02 Feb 2010 19:09:26 +0100, Stephen Jolly <stephen.jolly@rd.bbc.co.uk> wrote:
>> As actioned in the 21st Jan teleconference, here are the use cases that have motivated my specific proposal for supporting local network access in the WARP spec (see http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-webapps/2010JanMar/0173.html for details).
>> 
>> 1. A developer wishes to write widgets that can connect to the web API exposed by a network-connected television or personal video recorder (aka digital video recorder) on their home network.  This API allows (for example) the channel being viewed to be changed or the list of scheduled recordings to be modified, via a user interface presented by the widget.
> 
> During this teleconference, I was asked to elaborate my position on this topic.  The advantage of creating a definition of a local network is the following variant of the use case:
> 
> A developer wants to write a widget that posts whatever channel the user switches to on a network-connected TV to http://μblogging.example.com/.  The problem, with WARP as is that, since the network address of said TV is indeterminate, the developer's only option is to allow the widget to connect to any URL it wishes (specifying '*' in origin, or add a large (read: huge) set of origins in order to be able to do this.

Surely the same problem exists if you remove the dependency on the blogging service - ie if the widget merely wants to connect to the television?

> My proposal would be to add a second attribute to the specification, a boolean, such as origin-local, which would replace any IP address the user agent considers to be local, link-local or even local-machine addresses.  Alternatively, should fine-grained distinction between the three, these could alternatively be keywords in the existing origin attribute.

I would be OK with a solution along those lines, although leaving the definition of "local" up to the user agent still concerns me due to the potential impact on developers and users when the same widget behaves differently on different WUAs.

S

Received on Thursday, 4 February 2010 15:36:58 UTC