Web Intents

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 :)

kinlan4• 15 years ago

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

kinlan4• 15 years ago

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

eddanger• 15 years ago

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

brendino• 15 years ago

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.

alanh• 15 years ago

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.)

StavrosK• 15 years ago

The latter is just better caching and using the CDNs, it's not really so much about building them in the browser.

crabasa• 15 years ago

"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?

ori_b• 15 years ago

I sure do!

ez77• 15 years ago

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/

neilk• 15 years ago

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>.

abraham2• 15 years ago

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

Someone2• 15 years ago

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.

Web Intents

Related Stories