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Sharing

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Revision as of 18:04, 4 August 2014 by Annevk (talk | contribs) (→‎TODO)
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Figuring out sharing for the web.

Actors

  • End user
  • User agent
  • Items that can be shared (share item)
  • Place that has items to share (share source)
  • Place items can be shared with (share destination)

(Could potentially merge share source and share item.)

Use cases

Brief: E wants to share I (image, URL, ...) from S (The New Yorker, xkcd, ...) on D (Twitter, Facebook, Pocket ...)

Longer: End users want to share http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2014/07/conflict_continues_in_gaza.html from The Big Picture with their preferred social network or private database.

UI speculation

Share destination could be displayed on top of share source. In case of Twitter this might require almost the entire screen (on mobile). In case of Pocket this would not require much UI at all in the simple case.

Thus, an overlay browsing context of which the security properties are somehow still clear to the end user.

Constraints

  • A secure origin (TLS) is required to be a share destination. Requiring a secure origin for a share source seems like too much of a burden.
  • Share nothing other than the share item and the origin of the share source with the share destination (e.g. no DOM access).

registerProtocolHandler()

  • Open-ended scheme names does not work when UI requires knowledge about its scheme name. ("Can Gmail handle 'mailto'?" vs "Can Gmail handle email links?")
  • Replaces the current browsing contexts or spawns a new one. No overlay
  • Limited to sharing things that can be expressed through a URL

TODO

  • Scope of share items: restrict to URL of the share origin for now?
  • Share destination registration UI
  • Share UI: user-agent-initiated or share-source-initiated?

Resources