Re: Adding Web Intents to the Webapps WG deliverables

On Thu, Sep 22, 2011 at 2:36 PM, Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> There's no difference between two people coming up with the name "foo" and
> two people coming up with the name "http://webintents.org/foo", unless
> you're saying you're confident that people won't use the prefix the spec
> uses for its verbs for their verbs.

I don't think this claim makes sense. As a developer I have no way to
know if 'foo' is used by anyone else on the Internet, but it would be
trivial to check "http://webintents.org/foo".

>
> But this is a non-problem. In practice, we have plenty of examples of
> spaces where conflicts don't happen despite not having used long names
> such as URLs. For example:
>
>  - rel="" values in HTML
>  - element names in HTML
>  - MIME type names
>  - scheme names

I believe all of these examples have one or more central name
controls.  The rel example in particular provides a counter example to
using simple uncontrolled verbs:
http://microformats.org/wiki/existing-rel-values
Multiple naming authorities, layered on wiki, and still messy.

>
>
>> A verb on its own will imply that it is a web intents verb managed by
>> the webintents project and all the documentation for that will live
>> under webintents, which means we would then need to think about
>> standardisation and stewardship for the entire namespace.
>
> I don't see why. Just have a wiki page that people can list their verbs on
> and then point to their documentation.

A wiki is not comparable to the controlled naming systems in the four
examples you give above.  A wiki is a free for all that works great
when there is no money involved. A Web system involving 'share' along
with images, audio, and video will have money involved.

I think the intent names need a controlled namespace, either
centralized like your examples or decentralized as in the original
proposal. URLs need not be the format.  Note the Firefox extension
developers use domain@name format for unique ids.

jjb

Received on Sunday, 25 September 2011 17:29:00 UTC