Web Intents

Web Intents was an experimental framework for web-based inter-application communication and service discovery.

Web Intents consists of a discovery mechanism and a very light-weight RPC system between web applications, modelled after the Intents system in Android. In the context of the framework an Intent equals an action to be performed by a provider.^[1] Web Intents allow two web applications to communicate with each other, without either of them having to actually know what the other one is.^[2]

Support

Client

• Google Chrome versions 18 to 23 natively supported Web Intents.^[3] This support was disabled in version 24, citing the existence of a "number of areas for development in both the API and specific user experience in Chrome".^[4]
• There is a JavaScript shim with support for IE 8, IE 9, Opera, Safari, Firefox 3+ and Chrome 3+.^[5]

Server

• There are some Web Intents proxy pages that make available some real services that don't yet support intents.^[6]
• AddThis supports Web Intents by their sharing tools regardless of browser support.^[7]

History

Paul Kinlan of Google announced the Web Intents project in December 2010. He soon released a prototype API to GitHub. In August 2011 Google announced that Chrome would support Web Intents. Google and Mozilla have started co-operating to unify Web Intents and Mozilla's Web Activities/Web Discovery (which tries to solve the same problem) into one proposal.^[8][9][10]

In November 2012, Greg Billock of Google announced that experimental support of Web Intents had been removed from Chrome.^[4]

References

External links

• Web Intents introduction
• Web Intents Google+ Page
• Web Intents code on GitHub
• Web Intents demos
• Linux Weekly News: Differing intentions towards Web Intents
• Mozilla's Web Activities