<div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Mar 16, 2012 at 9:51 PM, François Revol <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:revol@free.fr">revol@free.fr</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
Hi,<br>
<div class="im"><br>
On -10/01/-28163 20:59, Jerome Leclanche wrote:<br>
> Good evening list<br>
><br>
> During the past couple of weeks, I've been working on a spec for intents<br>
> (best name I could come up with).<br>
><br>
> Intents are a way for applications to programatically describe what<br>
> functions they are able to fulfill. They go hand-in-hand with MIME types,<br>
> which describe on what type of content they are able to fulfill such<br>
> functions.<br>
> For example, while eog and Gimp may register the same MIME types, Gimp<br>
> would have an "Image Editor" intent, while eog would have an "Image Viewer"<br>
> intent.<br>
<br>
</div>Wow, that's an interesting idea...<br>
that BeOS implemented 15y ago :D<br>
<br>
It was called "suites" at the time, and yes, already included in the<br>
MIME types namespace.<br>
However it was mostly used for inter-app scripting at runtime.<br>
<br>
cf.<br>
<a href="http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/byte/08-scripting/" target="_blank">http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/byte/08-scripting/</a><br>
<a href="https://www.haiku-os.org/documents/dev/using_scripting_in_haiku" target="_blank">https://www.haiku-os.org/documents/dev/using_scripting_in_haiku</a><br>
<a href="http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/bible/bos/ch_scripting6.html" target="_blank">http://www.birdhouse.org/beos/bible/bos/ch_scripting6.html</a><br>
<br>
The API also included "verbs" however the only one ever defined was<br>
B_OPEN. From your description it's probably more what you meant.<br>
<br>
Sadly it was never used much, despite its great potential.<br>
The android "intents" are just yet another iteration on the idea.<br>
<br>
Haiku still uses the BeOS scripting API.<br>
<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><br>
François.<br>
</font></span></blockquote></div><div><br></div><div><br></div><div>Hi François<br></div><div><br></div><div>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:</div>
<div>"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."<br>
</div><div><br></div><div>It makes me want to go with the second intent/* syntax.</div><div>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.<br>
</div><div><br></div><div>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.</div>
<div><br></div><div>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. </div>
<div><br></div>J. Leclanche<br>