Needs a way to specify the ShareData parameter to Web Share API's share method

[othermaciej]

Declarative UI for Web Share API seems like a cool idea. However, this proposal is missing a way to provide the equivalent of the ShareDate dictionary that's passed to the Web Share API's share method. The goal of the Web Share API is to enable sharing objects that are represented by part of the page, not to share the page itself, as the user flow here seems to assume. An example would be, in a Mastodon web client, have buttons that can share an individual Toot, rather than the link to the user's whole Mastodon feed. Declarative buttons to invoke Web Share API for part of the page seem super useful. A button to share the page itself is not very useful. Websites don't use Web Share API for that today very much (afaik) and it's duplicative of the share button in the browser chrome.

[adactio]

Hi Maciej,

The use case for the declarative button isn't to cover all the uses of the Web Share API—the idea isn't that it's a one-to-one copy—but rather to cover one use case; sharing the URL of the current page. If you need to more than that (like the Mastodon example), then the existing JavaScript API is the way to go.

A button to share the page itself is not very useful. Websites don't use Web Share API for that today very much (afaik)

On the contrary, this appears to be the most common usage of the Web Share API by quite some way. Hence the idea of paving that particular cowpath.

I'm actively looking for uses of the Web Share API here: #1

If you have access to any data on how the API is being used (telemetry?) it would be great to some more info!

and it's duplicative of the share button in the browser chrome.

…which isn't always available. Like, for example, a progressive web app (excuse me, home page app) launched with minimal-ui or fullscreen.

[PaulKinlan]

Not sure how I missed this repo. Awesome!

I pulled some data from HTTP Archive using the following query.

1,648,176 responses body has a reference to navigator.share(. link to results < I can give you access.

SELECT 
 COUNT(*) AS count_of_origins,
 REGEXP_EXTRACT(body, r'navigator.share\([^\)]+\)') AS text
FROM `httparchive.response_bodies.2023_06_01_mobile` 
WHERE body LIKE '%navigator.share(%'
GROUP BY 2
ORDER BY 1 DESC

(take with a grain of salt as there are false positives and missing info - i.e, the regex doesn't work well with functions as arguments etc)

I've tabulated some sample results and looked at some of the reponses to see if I can work out what things like .share(e) are doing. If I was to give a summary after a 20-30 minute spelunk it looks like there are a significant number of cases sharing the current page URL (many of the JS widgets default to current url), or sharing the current embed URL.

Response Count	Code	Extra info
1169238	navigator.share({title:c.title,url:b})	Youtube embed - links to video
146645	navigator.share(e)	static.addtoany.com widget for images (not current page)
74188	navigator.share(t)	https://www.wix.com/app-market/wix-pro-gallery (images I think)
24246	navigator.share(n)	Yandex embed, likely current url to a selection of services
24177	navigator.share({url:location.href})
13111	navigator.share({url:n,text:i})	wix-vod-widget < current url to object
10612	navigator.share({url:e})
9448	navigator.share(this.shareData)
7686	navigator.share({ url: this.urlToShare, title: document.title })
7203	navigator.share({url:s})
6293	navigator.share(r)
6237	navigator.share(i)
5729	navigator.share(y(a)
5190	navigator.share(f(l)
4720	navigator.share(this.getShareOptions()
4639	navigator.share({ title: this.hasAttribute("share-title")

Hope this helps.