[webkit-dev] Proposed feature: Network Service Discovery

[Brendan Long]

On 08/29/2013 05:45 PM, Benjamin Poulain wrote:
> Can you explain a bit what it is for? What are the common use cases?
This would be useful for certain kinds of web apps. For example,a music
website like Pandora or Spotify could allow users to include music on
their local network. Or a service like Netflix could include local
network movies (on networked hard drives, or DVR's) in their search
results, and play them from the same interface.

Or use-case is to make a media center UI entirely in HTML5 (huge
portability benefits), and to allow that UI to discovery local DLNA
HTML5 Remote UI's (I'd love to put a link to what this is, but the spec
isn't public and the best link is our own page
<http://html5.cablelabs.com/dlna-rui/index.html> about it).

The use-cases would probably be more interesting if browsers were able
to advertise themselves, but that's not part of this spec unfortunately.

I suspect that Firefox would be interested, since it fits into the
"Firefox OS" idea, but it looks like no one has really talked to them
about it yet.

> Who already implements it?
Opera supports it
<http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/network-service-discovery-api-support-in-opera/>
(it looks like an experimental build though).

This person
<http://jcdufourd.wp.mines-telecom.fr/2013/05/15/network-service-discovery-api/>
made a Java applet to add support to existing browsers.

There's a thread on the Chromium mailing list
<https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#%21topic/blink-dev/HT0KZKuTLxM>
about this.

It sounds like they're planning to update the spec before implementing
it though, since there's some strange requirements for garbage
collection and they want to do a review of the security and privacy
implications.

mark a. foltz said,
> Adam,
>
> Thanks for your feedback.  (I'm working with Justin on this.)  I'll
> summarize our response and plan.
>
> (1) Agreed that a longer discussion of the security and privacy
> implications of the API is warranted.  Rich posted a section to the
> spec [1] that is a good starting point; I plan on working with the
> editors on minimizing the opportunities for harm, and minimizing the
> ability to fingerprint users of the API, which was brought up by the
> Chrome privacy team.
>
> (2) Rich posted an update to the spec to address the language around
> garbage collection.
>
> https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/dap/diff/b4b2569b4e9b/discovery-api/Overview.src.html
> <https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/dap/diff/b4b2569b4e9b/discovery-api/Overview.src.html>
>
> (3) I reviewed the last several months of list traffic and, to my
> ability to scan, haven't seen comments or commitment from other
> browser vendors.  I'll let Rich fill in if there are any updates here.
>  I think an effort to evangelize and get additional participation will
> be helpful to the spec as a whole.
>
> Given the current set of feedback, we plan on working with the spec
> editors and coming back when we feel it is ready to implement.
>

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