Web Share

Full Title or Meme

An API for sharing text, links and other content to an arbitrary destination of the user's choice.

Context

• Web Share API current draft at W3C.
• Web Share is only available in the context of transient activation (previously known as user activation).
• One principle is that the web site cannot know what native apps the user has loaded, or which app was chosen by the user to handle the content as that would "fingerprint" the user.

Problems

• Evaluate Readiness to Ship describes a problem at YouTube.

Solutions

The solution space is deliberately limited to the following. Extensions are expected and in process, but slow as uptake is determined by each browser independently.

• The Web Share API is only used to move from a web page to an app which handles the following file types:
  • Application
    • pdf - application/pdf
  • Audio
    • flac - audio/flac
    • m4a - audio/x-m4a
    • mp3 - audio/mpeg (also accepts audio/mp3)
    • oga - audio/ogg
    • ogg - audio/ogg
    • opus - audio/ogg
    • wav - audio/wav
    • weba - audio/webm
    • mage
    • avif - image/avif
    • bmp - image/bmp
    • gif - image/gif
    • ico - image/x-icon
    • jfif - image/jpeg
    • jpeg - image/jpeg
    • jpg - image/jpeg***.pjp - image/jpeg
    • pjpeg - image/jpeg
    • png - image/png
    • svg - image/svg+xml
    • svgz - image/svg+xml
    • tif - image/tiff
    • tiff - image/tiff
    • webp - image/webp
    • xbm - image/x-xbitmap
  • Text
    • css - text/css
    • csv - text/csv
    • ehtml - text/html
    • htm - text/html
    • html - text/html
    • shtm - text/html
    • shtml - text/html
    • text - text/plain
    • txt - text/plain
  • Video
    • m4v - video/mp4
    • mp4 - video/mp4
    • mpeg - video/mpeg
    • mpg - video/mpeg
    • ogm - video/ogg
    • ogv - video/ogg
    • webm - video/webm