On 13 Feb 2010, at 20:52, Doug Schepers wrote:
Hi, Scott-This is certainly a valid aspect of Widgets... as a platform for a specific kind of Web application: a collaboration/discussion/sharing app.But it seems to me that this is conflating two orthogonal things: an application host environment, and a collaboration platform. Widgets can host the full range of Web apps; and a collaboration platform shouldn't be confined to Widgets.The context for a Widget, in my opinion, shouldn't inherently contain the users of that Widget; that is functionality that should be specific to collaboration apps.As an analogy, think of the Geolocation API. A recipe widget which finds recipes based on a list of available ingredients has no use for that API, but a shopping widget might; traditional web sites built to do those things would have the same needs. So, the Geolocation API is much better off as a standalone API that is available when needed, and not imposed when not needed, as general functionality, not just for Widgets.
Agreed. A Widget is only one possible consumer of such an API, so it make sense to define the API separately (with Widgets as one type of use case).
It also seems that it would require more than just an API... it needs an infrastructure from which to draw the relationship data, and security considerations. Like the Geolocation API encapsulates underlying device/service functionality (GPS, cell/wifi triangulation, logged IP locations, etc.), and the Widget Interface's Storage API uses functionality defined elsewhere (LocalStorage, SessionStorage, IndexedDB, WebDB, remote web service), a Social API would have to rely upon some source of data, which is not inherent in the device or a single established web service, so that would need to be defined.
Indeed, both collaborative and social apps require the container to have a means of access to a data source, and are also responsible for applying appropriate access and privacy policies; a parallel here would be DAP (and OMTP BONDI).
I don't think the WebApps WG is the right place to work on a Social API; I don't think it would get the specific interest such an API would require to do it right, with the current participants of this group (though others in the group should correct me if I'm wrong). Also, the WebApps WG has an urgent need to renew its charter to bring in deliverables we've already agreed are in scope, so I would be extremely reluctant to bring in a deliverable at this stage that has as broad a scope as a Social API.That's not to say a Social API is not useful or desirable. I'd love to see this done at W3C, and I think it's important to make sure it works well in both web sites and widgets. So, my counterproposal is to suggest that you work with Harry Halpin to propose a new Social API WG (maybe under Interaction Domain, but more fittingly under the Technology and Society Domain), and bring in the Google Wave and Open Social folks (since Google is already a W3C member), and find other stakeholders (Facebook?) who might also be interested, to help standardize what they have all already done. Harry and I have talked a bit before about next steps for the Social Web, and this strikes me as a logical and pragmatic next step. I will be happy to do what I can to help set this up, and to ensure good communication between our groups, and to make sure that it works well with Widgets.
I think this is a very good proposal; I'm happy to drop the proposal for doing this in Webapps and work instead with the Social Web group as you suggest.
Regards- -Doug Schepers W3C Team Contact, SVG and WebApps WGs Scott Wilson wrote (on 2/13/10 5:21 AM):Hi Doug, I'm not adamant that these requirements are met specifically just forWidgets, just that these are where the current use-cases come from. They certainly ought to be supported through more general technologies wherepossible. There is also the issue of abstraction; should a widget author be looking at low-level APIs to deliver functionality, or call a common high-level API which is then implemented in adevice/architecture-specific way? E.g. if a widget author script wants to get the list of current participants, should it need to be rewrittenfor every platform it might be deployed in (e.g. XHR in some, Web Sockets in another, native code another...) or can it call "widget.getParticipants()" and let the UA handle the implementation?Just as, for example, the Widget Interface defines "preferences" usingthe Storage API: the actual choice of implementation of this(LocalStorage, SessionStorage, IndexedDB, WebDB, remote web service) isup to the UA.So what I'm talking about here, just to be clear, are the high level API abstractions available to a running widget (and potentially other types of web application) and not any underlying protocols used to implementthem. The specific high-level APIs I'm interested in are: 1. Participants [1]: getParticipants, getViewer, getOwner, setParticipantCallback 2. State [1]: getState, state.submitDelta, state.submitValue, setStateCallback 3. Friends/People [2]: getViewerFriends, getOwnerFriends (Note these are subsets of the functionality of the referencedspecifications; other functionality they specify is already covered byother W3C work such as Widgets:TWI [3] and Widgets:VMMF[4])In some cases these APIs could map onto DAP (e.g. getViewer would map to a call on the Contacts API) but in other cases would rely on other kinds of implementations (OpenSocial itself, XHR, Websockets, Widget Feature extensions etc). The principle interoperability being addressed would bea consistent runtime model for a widget author irrespective of deployment environment. Widgets P&C already has a Feature extension mechanism for handlingavailability of additional APIs that would be well suited to negotiatingavailability of these types of APIs [5]. Apache Wookie already implements Widgets P&C with a subset of the Google Wave Gadget API in this fashion [6]. S[1] http://code.google.com/apis/wave/extensions/gadgets/ reference.html[2] http://wiki.opensocial.org/index.php?title=OSAPI_Specification#osapi.people [3] http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets-apis/ [4] http://www.w3.org/TR/2009/WD-widgets-vmmf-20091006/ [5] http://www.w3.org/TR/widgets/#the-feature-element [6] http://incubator.apache.org/wookie/ On 12 Feb 2010, at 23:50, Doug Schepers wrote:Hi, Scott- I'm still confused as to what you're asking for as a chartered deliverable for Widgets. Like others, I am extremely reluctant to define any special functionality for Widgets, when it could be useful for Web applications at large. Let me try to break down some of what you are asking for in terms of specs we are already doing: * communication between different widgets on the same computer: Web Messaging [1] * communication between widgets on different computers: Web Sockets API [2], XHR [3] (through a gateway server) * access to contacts on a specific device: Contacts API (DAP WG) [4]* access to relationships between contacts, etc.: no current work, butpossible as an online service (XHR), or locally through markup like RDFa or microdata I don't know what social APIs OpenSocial or Google Wave Gadget API expose, but anything above and beyond the deliverables listed aboveshould probably be developed by another group (maybe in collaborationwith the RDFa WG, since it probably has to do with ontologies?), and simply reused within Widgets or Web apps.But maybe I missed your point... can you give me a concise outline of what the specific use cases and requirements you have for this socialAPI are? [1] http://dev.w3.org/html5/postmsg/ [2] http://dev.w3.org/html5/websockets/ [3] http://dev.w3.org/2006/webapi/XMLHttpRequest/ [4] http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/contacts/ Regards- -Doug Schepers W3C Team Contact, SVG and WebApps WGs Scott Wilson wrote (on 2/12/10 5:39 PM):Specifically I'm thinking of access to friends/friends-of lists from author scripts in a Widget runtime. This is something of interest towidget developers, as it enables widgets to operate as social applications.OpenSocial is an obvious source of inspiration here - however the actual social APIs are only a small part of OpenSocial (which also covers all aspects of app packaging. processing. discovery and persistence) and arenot easily reused in other kinds of devices and architectures. The interop problem arises as currently authors of apps/widgets arebasically faced with two completely different "stacks" of specifications based on the presence or absence of a few very small features - and the "friends" API represents the main feature gap between the W3C widgetsfamily of specifications and OpenSocial. Looking at recent developments, e.g. Vodafone's recent work onintegrating phone contacts and social network contacts, suggests that it will not only be web widgets that would be able to access this type ofAPI, but also mobile and desktop widgets. I would propose looking at this area with the W3C Social Web XG andidentifying a set of spec requirements either for webapps or DAP (it could go either way - social APIs may fit better in DAP as they haveanalogues with the contacts API work there, however Widgets are the obvious vehicle for making use of such APIs. In any case some co-ordination would be useful).Currently in Apache Wookie we implement the Google Wave Gadget API as ameans of supporting inter-widget communication in collaborationscenarios (e.g. multi-user environments); however the fact that this API is completely different in almost every respect from the Google API toget at friends (as opposed to participants) indicates there is a significant interop gap where W3C could make a difference. (One way of looking at this is that requesta for "contacts","participants" and "friends" are just differently contextualized querieson a core "people API" and should behave consistently.)
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