[whatwg] Proposal for IsSearchProviderInstalled / AddSearchProvider

[Peter Kasting]

>
> On Tue, 17 May 2011, Bjartur Thorlacius wrote:
> > Then why add an API when we've already got (IMO superior) declarative
> > markup?
>
> In the case of adding the API to the spec, because it's already
> implemented. As to why it was added to the browsers, no idea.


Certainly there's no declarative markup for IsSearchProviderInstalled().
 As for AddSearchProvider(), I know one reason it was added to Chrome was
explicitly to expose the "and make default" functionality.  Of course one
could argue that a UA could give users the option to make any provider
default for whatever UI it exposes for the declarative case.  But there are
a couple fine points worth mentioning: one is that since users rarely want
to make an engine default, adding that option to the UI all the time would
be even more annoying than adding "[ ] And set as my homepage" to whatever
UI is shown for "bookmark this page", and thus UAs may shy away from this
idea.  Another is that engines may wish to explicitly request to be made
default in response to some explicit user action on the page, e.g. clicking
a "Make this my default search engine" button.  Creating this UI and making
it work smoothly is difficult with the existing mechanisms.

Note that I am not the one who proposed, specced, or implemented this in
Chrome; I'm just trying to convey a few things that seem apparent to me as
another Chrome UI engineer :)

PK