On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 9:51 PM, François Revol <[email protected]> wrote:
> Hi, > > On -10/01/-28163 20:59, Jerome Leclanche wrote: > > Good evening list > > > > During the past couple of weeks, I've been working on a spec for intents > > (best name I could come up with). > > > > Intents are a way for applications to programatically describe what > > functions they are able to fulfill. They go hand-in-hand with MIME types, > > which describe on what type of content they are able to fulfill such > > functions. > > For example, while eog and Gimp may register the same MIME types, Gimp > > would have an "Image Editor" intent, while eog would have an "Image > Viewer" > > intent. > > Wow, that's an interesting idea... > that BeOS implemented 15y ago :D > > It was called "suites" at the time, and yes, already included in the > MIME types namespace. > However it was mostly used for inter-app scripting at runtime. > > cf. > http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/byte/08-scripting/ > https://www.haiku-os.org/documents/dev/using_scripting_in_haiku > http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/bible/bos/ch_scripting6.html > > The API also included "verbs" however the only one ever defined was > B_OPEN. From your description it's probably more what you meant. > > Sadly it was never used much, despite its great potential. > The android "intents" are just yet another iteration on the idea. > > Haiku still uses the BeOS scripting API. > > François. > Hi François Thanks for the links, I didn't know about BeOS' suites. It's a really cool idea, having the logic within applications themselves. I especially liked that bit: "Scripting suite names look like MIME filetypes (like "suite/vnd.Be-control"), but they aren't. Suite names are completely internal to BeOS, and the fact that they look like MIME types is just a geeky detail." It makes me want to go with the second intent/* syntax. After discussing it with a few people on irc, the category idea kind of stuck; eg instead of ImageEditor, you would have Image.Editor, Image.Viewer. Another point that turned up was: do we need metadata for each intent (like mime types have: names, comments). I don't think we do, it would be up to the application to say "Image editor", but i thought it was worth bringing up. If there are no major comments/changes/obvious misses, I will begin writing a spec over the next few weeks, as I'm unsure how much time I have, and will post back once it's done. I would love to get some advice on the process to propose a spec and get it accepted. J. Leclanche
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