Intent Tag Has Landed In Webkit

The combinations of web intents and Google's GDrive implementation / Dropbox seem interesting. I could link a file with a web intent, you use your Chrome App or similar to edit it, save it back to your Dropbox / drive - then your editor makes you another link which you can share with others to start the process over again.<p>When you think about it this seems to align well with the original philosophies of the web. Exciting times.

I really want Web Intents to take off. It's like assigning programs to certain file extensions, but instead assigning intents to web services. So you could take a photo, edit the image, and share it to your social network of choice. The websites would use a common API, they don't need to program exceptions for each-other like we do with iOS apps. Android does it a lot better, but this could really work on the web.<p>Hopefully Google and Mozilla will put enough resources behind this that it becomes standardized on, and maybe even Microsoft will get on board.<p>Apple, well, probably not.

Similar or related initiatives:<p>Mozilla web apps / web activities: <a href="https://people.mozilla.com/~anarayanan/webapps.html" rel="nofollow">https://people.mozilla.com/~anarayanan/webapps.html</a><p><a href="http://blog.mozilla.org/labs/2011/07/web-apps-update-experiments-in-web-activities-app-discovery/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.mozilla.org/labs/2011/07/web-apps-update-experim...</a><p>A overview of currently envisioned use cases: <a href="http://usecases.webintents.org/" rel="nofollow">http://usecases.webintents.org/</a><p>Activity base schema (IBM, SAY, Facebook, Six Apart, Google, Microsoft, MySpace): <a href="http://activitystrea.ms/head/activity-schema.html" rel="nofollow">http://activitystrea.ms/head/activity-schema.html</a><p>Web intents at w3c: <a href="http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/web-intents/raw-file/tip/spec/Overview.html" rel="nofollow">http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/web-intents/raw-file/tip/spec/Overview...</a>

more info: <a href="http://webintents.org/" rel="nofollow">http://webintents.org/</a><p><i>Web Intents is a framework for client-side service discovery and inter-application communication. Services register their intention to be able to handle an action on the user's behalf. </i>

This could be a good push for interoperability, but it is more likely to end up being another vector for inadvertent data disclosure as the majority of people just click "Yes" when asked for permission.

Interesting that the JavaScript interface is very similar to Android's own intents. From the example in the spec:<p><pre><code> var intent = new Intent("http://webintents.org/edit", "text/uri-list;type=image/jpeg", getImageDataURI(...)); navigator.startActivity(intent, imageEdited); </code></pre> <a href="http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/web-intents/raw-file/tip/spec/Overview.html#example" rel="nofollow">http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/web-intents/raw-file/tip/spec/Overview...</a><p>You'll notice that all of the editors are Googlers.

Great explanation here for those of us who didnt quite understand at first<p><a href="http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/web-intents/raw-file/tip/spec/Overview.html#example" rel="nofollow">http://dvcs.w3.org/hg/web-intents/raw-file/tip/spec/Overview...</a><p>What are the security concerns?

Hmm, why not just add an action attribute to the anchor tag?<p><pre><code> &#60;a href="image.png" action="edit"&#62; &#60;a href="myblog.feed" action="subscribe"&#62; &#60;a href="rickroll.vid" action="view" target="_blank"&#62;</code></pre>

This reminds me a little of OLE (but for the web). Not the same thing but a few similarities.<p>Seems like something you could probably already do with like an iframe and postMessage. There is a JavaScript based implementation, maybe that's how they do it.<p><a href="http://www.webintents.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.webintents.org/</a>

How are web intents different from the Semantic Web? The only differences in ideology I can find right now is the prevalence of actions over data. But still, to what degree are these concepts similar?