

Web Intents - telemachos
http://webintents.org/

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masklinn
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2722549>

There seems to have been little if any change since then.

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kinlan
This is mostly an official announcement of the project in chrome

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neilk
Shouldn't this be handled by ordinary links with protocols?

"mailto:" is a protocol that is interpreted by the user agent, to launch the
user's preferred mail client. We could also have "share:", to launch the
user's preferred way of sharing things.

So why not this?

    
    
        <a href="share:http://sample.com/url/">Share this</a> 
    

It's a bit odd to have the protocol wrapping what looks like another protocol,
but it's legal. One might even have the convention that an empty share means
the current url. Then it would be just

    
    
        <a href="share:">Share this</a>.

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abraham
It breaks down when you need to pass rich data. Images, videos, and JSON for
example.

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Someone
What is not rich with <http://sample.com/url/> ?

The URL could point to an image, a movie, a web page, JSON, etc. The only
thing it does not make easy/practical is passing large data chunks inline.

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abraham
That requires additional work from the Intent providers. They can no longer be
pure JavaScript if they have to request data from other domains, it increases
latency as you wait for requests to fetch the item to complete.

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Someone
Why is it important that intent providers can be pure JavaScript? I would
think most providers would be native programs or run in a browser.

As to the latency: if large data isn't available locally, someone will have to
take a hit. I do not see why severing this to the provider would be
problematic.

If it is available locally, I would hope that the intent provider can retrieve
it from cache.

Also, deferring the loading enables optimizations. Suppose I see an image on
example.com that I want to share using Flickr. If I send the URL to Flickr, it
can retrieve the image from example.com using its fat Internet pipe. If,
instead, I have to send the image, I have much more upstream data. Even at
home, that can be problematic. Mobile, things are worse.

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brendino
It appears Web Intents has taken the time-tested concept of an enterprise
service bus (<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enterprise_service_bus>) and used
it in a non-enterprise application - namely social networking / bookmarking.

Here's a few ways that makes this promising:

\- Using a common set of standard services makes communication application-
agnostic

\- It reduces dependencies across applications - applications can change, but
the services remain the same

\- Innovation will be driven by features, not by adoption of one application's
API vs. another application's API - this plays into Google's philosophy that
innovation should ultimately prevail

Interesting stuff.

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jsmcgd
To whom ever might be listening and can do something about it: please use a
JSON format and not an XML format for configuration files. Concision and
aesthetics count. Thank you for your consideration :)

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kinlan
There is no XML. We have html that's about it.

~~~
kinlan
We also specifically want to avoid any sort of configuration file (see
problems with appcache)

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alanh
Yes. Please, please, please. There is no reason sharing actions, etc., should
not be handled by the user agent.

(I would also like to see browsers more closely support e.g. the big JS
libraries like jQuery (UI) et al by having a local copy you can opt in to
using instead of having the user download them yet again, but that's a
separate dream.)

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crabasa
"There is no reason sharing actions, etc., should not be handled by the user
agent."

Wait, why stop there? Aren't there all kinds of actions that should be handled
by the user-agent? There are N verbs that we could get excited about wiring
up, across M potential service providers. Woo hoo!

Of course, once the enthusiasm for the shiny wears off, we don't _really_ want
to have to experience the web this way. Do we?

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ori_b
I sure do!

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allad
Reminds me of old Sun RPC Directory.

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dntbrme
or UDDI
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Description_Discovery...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Description_Discovery_and_Integration)

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ez77
Paul, what's the story behind the fairly different sites [1], [2] and [3]?

    
    
      [1] http://webintents.org/
      [2] http://www.webintents.org/
      [3] http://www.webintents.com/

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yalogin
The other post with the link to techcrunch also refers to this URL. So is this
a google project then?

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kinlan
Yes. But we are working with Mozilla on it and will have a working group set
up soon.

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eddanger
From an end user point of view this is terrible, I don't understand the point.
Don't give me options, just do it!

