Differing intentions towards Web Intents

Posted Jun 6, 2012 7:44 UTC (Wed) by massimiliano (subscriber, #3048)
In reply to: Differing intentions towards Web Intents by jospoortvliet
Parent article: Differing intentions towards Web Intents

the only thing which comes to my mind while reading this.is - didn't the desktop solve this 20 years ago?

Yeah, but... which desktop?

AFAIK, each desktop OS implementation from a different vendor (Windows, OSX, and in the past BeOS or OS/2) has its own API for defining these "MIME associations". The Linux desktop has its own Freedesktop standard which luckily is followed by all desktop implementations here.

So the situation on the web looks similar, with every vendor trying to push its own solution. The real difference is that on the web there is a real push towards avoiding fragmentation, so in the end one solution is likely to prevail on the others. The fact that this solution will be the "best" according to any criteria is probably (sadly) irrelevant, like in the Betamax-VHS case, or in the Javascript language case...