Summary: Episode 176 of The SitePoint Podcast is now available! This week our regular interview host Louis Simoneau (@rssaddict) interviews Paul Kinlan (@paul_kinlan) about the Web Intents API from Google and where it’s going. Listen in Your Browser Play this episode directly in your browser — just click the orange “play” button below: Download this Episode You can download this episode as a standalone MP3 file. Here’s the link: SitePoint Podcast #176: Web Intents in Depth with Paul Kinlan (MP3, 22:47, 21.9MB) Subscribe to the Podcast The SitePoint Podcast is on iTunes! Add the SitePoint Podcast to your iTunes player. Or, if you don’t use iTunes, you can subscribe to the feed directly. Episode Summary Louis and Paul discuss how the Web Intents API is being worked on at the W3C and other groups, what it will mean for web apps and browsers, and how this could even extend in the future to working with other devices in your home. googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display('div-gpt-ad-1328644474660-10'); }); Browse the full list of links referenced in the show at http://delicious.com/sitepointpodcast/176. Interview Transcript Louis: Hello and welcome to another episode of the SitePoint Podcast. Today in the show, I thought it would be a good idea to delve a little deeper into a topic that we’ve covered in the past. So, a few episodes ago on the podcast, we talked a little bit about Web Intents, which is a new browser API specification. At the time, it had just landed in a release of Chrome, and we talked a little bit about what it was. But I thought it was a really interesting topic and worth going into more depth. So, today on the show I have with me Paul Kinlan, who’s a Developer Advocate at Google, and who blogs and talks a lot about the Web Intents specification, just to go over this a little bit in more detail. Hi, Paul, welcome to the show. Paul: Hi. Thank you for having me. Louis: It’s a pleasure to have you. Paul: Yeah. It’s good to be here. I’m currently in L.A. I normally am based in London. So, yeah, my time zones are all pretty crazy. Louis: Yeah, well L.A. is a little bit easier actually for us here in Australia to coordinate with. GMT is the worst. It’s always exactly the middle of the night whenever we’re awake in Australia. Well, it’s great to have you on the show. So, before we dive in maybe for anyone who hasn’t heard the previous episode – or even people who have because my understanding of Web Intents was, at the time, fairly limited, so I probably butchered a few things. Do you want to talk a little bit about what the Web Intents specification is and what its role is in the modern browser? Paul: Yeah. Web Intents is a specification that we’ve been working on with kind of partnership with the W3C. It’s still kind of in a very kind of early, experimental stage at the moment. It’s by no way an official standard just yet. But it’s something that we’re working on to try and make it easier for developers to build connected web applications. Kind of the thing that we find at the moment is when people build applications they’ll talk to another web app, they do a whole load of server work to kind of get two apps talking together, or they use kind of JavaScript widgets. There’s no consistent API to kind of connect those two services together. But also at the same time, there’s no kind of one consistent way of being able to plug in your own preferred service to talk to another application. So, if you were on a website and you wanted to share a link to, say, Google Plus and it wasn’t on the page – but only Twitter and, say, Facebook or some other social networks are on there – right now, there’s no other way than getting the developer to actually implement that integration to, say, Google Plus into their site. Web Intents is designed [...]
