[whatwg] Proposal: <intent> tag for Web Intents API

Tue Dec 6 12:25:21 PST 2011

On Tue, 06 Dec 2011 19:40:20 +0100, Paul Kinlan <paulkinlan at google.com>  
wrote:
> I would like to add that we also had a long discussion about trying to
> re-use the meta element for specifying intents.
>
> The syntax was something like:
> <meta name="intent-action" content="http://webintents.org/share" />
> <meta name="intent-type" content="image/*" />
>
> Pros:
> * declarative
> * use's existing tags so no changes to html spec
>
> Cons:
> * no multiplicity - can't define multiple intents on the page without
> complex encoding in the content attribute
> * programmatically adding an intent into a page is very hard because
> there are two tags.  The UA can't decide when to throw up the prompt
> to grant access to install the web app as an intent handler.

You could also have

<meta name="intent" content="http://webintents.org/share image/*">

or some such. Splitting a string on spaces and using the result is not  
that hard and a common pattern. And seems like a much better alternative  
than changing the HTML parser. Especially changing the way <head> is  
parsed is hairy. Every new element we introduce there will cause a <body>  
to be implied before it in down-level clients. That's very problematic.

-- 
Anne van Kesteren
http://annevankesteren.nl/