Re: New approach to activities/intents

On Tue, 4 Nov 2014, at 03:42, Anne van Kesteren wrote:
> A couple of us at Mozilla have been trying to figure out how to revive
> activities/intents for the web. Both work relatively well in closed
> environments such as Firefox OS and Android, but seem harder to deploy
> in a generic way on the web.
> 
> What we've been looking at instead is solving a smaller use case. A
> Sharing API to start and then hopefully reuse the building blocks for
> other features that need to be liberated.
> 
> https://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Sharing/API has a sketch for what a very
> minimal Sharing API could look like.
> 
> Our thinking is that something like the overlay browsing context could
> be reused to make e.g. <input type=file> or "save as" extensible going
> forward.
> 
> However, admittedly it still doesn't really click. It feels a bit too
> much like e.g. the various search extensions browsers offer. Too much
> work for little return. Furthermore, freeing the web somehow from
> closely knitted silos seems like a worthwhile goal, but is often
> counter to what those silos are interested in. So it might be that
> we're still not quite there yet, thoughts appreciated.

My understanding of the document is that a website can register itself
as a share endpoint but can't try to programmatically starts a share
action; instead, the user will use the browser UI to do so. Is that
correct? I assume also that the UA would show a UI requesting the user
whether they want to accept foo.com to be added as a share endpoint,
right?

Wouldn't be worth experimenting first with a list of predefined share
endpoints (that you anyway might want to have) and see if the feature is
actually something that users are looking for? Furthermore, wouldn't
that make sense to have a similar mechanism than Open Search and have a
way for a website to advertise its share endpoint(s)? Maybe the Manifest
could be a good use for that. Generally speaking, I see a lot of common
aspects between Open Search and this proposal.

-- Mounir

Received on Thursday, 6 November 2014 22:02:41 UTC