Google announced a new set of APIs for its web browser Chrome, which are designed to connect applications and sites across the web. Web intentions, that Google calls its new API meta-site Web, allows sites Web pass data between them - for example, to change a photograph or share a URL with friends.
Mozilla developers have worked on a similar framework for Firefox, and now Google says that it will work with Mozilla to develop a simple API that works in both browsers.
Intentions Web API was designed by Paul Kinlan last year. Kinlan, who is a developer advocate at Google chrome, borrowed the idea of the Android platform, which uses Android intentions to pass data between the Android applications.
So just that are the intentions of the Web? In addition, the easiest way to understand is for example. Take the sometimes overwhelming proliferation of buttons on web pages that allow you to do something with the current page, if it's like Tweet, + 1, read later, add to the Instapaper and so on. Instead of adding a dozen badges in your site, intentions Web creates a bridge linking your site to any website your visitor wants to use. Web intentions define an API for your site to use and a different API for the site to use. Connect them together and data transfer becomes a process simple and fast, both for users and developers.
It is a huge step in the current situation. The greatest victory is perhaps that put your visitors in control of the Web intentions - they can select the actions they would like to exercise and what external sites they would like to manage these actions. Some may share your page on Facebook, others on Twitter, still others may register their Instapaper account and so on, all of same three lines of code you added to your site.
It is not, however, all the useful Web can do. The wider objective of the intentions of the Web is to provide a generic way of communication between the sites in tasks as diverse that editing photos, listen to music or to shorten URLs.
The second half of the video below shows take Mozilla on how useful Web ("Web activities" in the language of Mozilla) might work.
For some examples of code and examples of work, on the head to the new site WebIntents.org and see the examples (the example of the image is particularly well show off the coast of the potential power of the useful Web).
For some more information about the intentions of Web, see Paul Kinlan blog, particularly its overview post on the brief history of the intentions of the Web. The creator of microformats, Tantek Celik, also has a position of nice on what he calls a Web Actions (same thing, better name). Celik decomposes the idea behind the intentions of the Web and how they benefit the developers, but both users.
