[whatwg] register*Handler and Web Intents

Thu Aug 2 03:22:43 PDT 2012

On Thu, Jul 26, 2012 at 5:20 AM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> Thus, I propose a parallel mechanism in the form of an empty
> element that goes in the <head>:
>
>   <intent
>     action="edit"     intent action, e.g. open or edit, default "share"
>     type="image/png"  MIME type filter, default omitted, required if scheme omitted
>     scheme="mailto"   Scheme filter, default omitted, required if type omitted
>     href=""           Handler URL, default "" (current page)
>     title="Foo"       Handler user-visible name, required attribute
>     disposition=""    HandlerDisposition values, default "overlay"
>   >

This is a severe violation of the Degrade Gracefully design principle.
Adopting your proposal would mean that pages that include the intent
element in head would parse significantly differently in browsers that
predate the HTML parsing algorithm or in browsers that implement it in
its current form. I believe that having the intent element break the
parser out of head in browsers that don't contain the parser
differences you implicitly propose would cause a lot of grief to Web
authors and would hinder the adoption of this feature.

My concerns could be addressed in any of these three ways:
1) Rename <intent> to <link>
2) Rename <intent> to <meta>
3) Make <intent> have an end tag and make it placed in <body> rather than <head>

I prefer solution #1.

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/