[Webkit-unassigned] [Bug 73039] [Web Intents] Flagged-off implementation of an intent tag for registration.

Thu Dec 1 14:32:14 PST 2011

https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=73039

--- Comment #20 from Greg Billock <gbillock at google.com>  2011-12-01 14:32:14 PST ---
(In reply to comment #19)
> > Do you mean invoking an intent?
> 
> No, I mean register an intent.
> 
> > I'm not sure how an SVG document would call a DOM API. Can SVG scripts get access to the navigator object?
> 
> Yes.
> 
> > I'm not familiar with all the constraints there. Certainly an HTML wrapper with inline SVG could use the intent tag as well as navigator.startActivity, but I don't know how HTML scripts interact with inline SVG scripts.
> 
> An SVG document is a full-fledged part of the web platform.  It can use all the same DOM APIs an HTML document can use.
> 
> > And definitely join the discussion on public-web-intents! You're right; that's where final decisions will get made on the feature.
> 
> Unfortunately, I don't have time to join ever standards mailing list that interests me.  I'm happy to abide by the decisions of the working group, but it doesn't seem like the working group has made a decision in this regard.  If that's an incorrect understanding, please point me toward the record of such a decision.

You're right, we're still too early in the process to have produced decisions. :-) This patch is more experimental in nature, and is intended to give developers the ability to enable the functionality with build or command line flags.

> It concerns me that the folks designing this API don't understand the relationship between HTML and SVG documents.  That makes me worry that they'll make suboptimal design decisions because they don't understand how the web platform works.
> 
> As I wrote above, I'm not super excited about this patch, but I'm not going to stand in the way if another reviewer thinks we should accept it.

I'm not sure I understand the objection yet. I mean, surely just because a browser can display an image/jpeg or a text/plain file doesn't mean special consideration has to be given to how such files interact with various web platform features, right? Or is there a role for SVG files that I don't understand?

Put more formally, the functionality in this patch (the <intent> tag), is a proposal for how HTML-based resources can annotate themselves for discovery by the browser (or other third-party mechanisms) as offering services accessible through the Web Intents DOM API. As I mentioned, it is not even the only such mechanism in the overall proposal. I'm happy to admit that accounting for discoverability of SVG files as services accessible through the Web Intents DOM API is a non-goal of this functionality. As such, this patch proposes a change to HTMLTagNames.in, not svgnames.in. (That is, it appears to me that the WebKit implementation doesn't treat these as part of the same namespace.) Is there something I'm missing here that needs fixing to be semantically correct? (It's a very real possibility! :-))

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