JsWidget

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Revision as of 22:35, 27 July 2007 by Paulproteus (talk | contribs) (Language selection)
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Creative Commons currently provides two methods for integrating license selection into applications: the Partner Interface and the web service API. The CC Javascript Widget will provide an additional, lightweight method for integrating license selection into web applications. When complete the widget will be used in WpLicense as well.

Note that the JsWidget is currently under development but a 0.2 preview is available.

Sample Usage

This widget generated will be similar to the chooser currently deployed at CC Labs.

Jswidget-0.2-screenshot.png

The following is a simple example of how the widget would be included in a page to create a license selector. A live demonstration is available on the CC labs site.


  <html>
    <head>
      <title>Example Widget Page</title>
    </head>
    <body>
     .
     .
     .
        <div id="cc_widget_container">
          <script src="http://api.creativecommons.org/jswidget/tags/0.2/complete.js"></script>
     .
     .
     .
    </body>
  </html>

Availability

You can play with a 0.2 pre-release right now!

  • 2007-07-25: Released 0.2. The UI now doesn't ask or contain spurious questions, plus translation is halfway there.
  • 2007-07-19: Released 0.1. Don't try to use this in production, but DO let us know how it fits into your systems and what you would want us to change.

Features

"Seeding"

This is as of 0.3.

  • If the user has already selected a license through some other means, and you want to "seed" the JavaScript widget with the choices the user has already made, just create a hidden form field whose ID is cc_js_seed_uri with the URI of the license you want to start with.
    • NOTE that right now we ignore the license version you provide and simply upgrade it to the most recent version the jurisdiction offers.

Language selection

This is as of 0.3.

  •  ?locale=XX for choosing language
  • If omitted, Apache Content Negotiation will select the most appropriate language based on the user's preferences, defaulting to English

Extracting results

This is as of 0.3.

  • There are two hidden form fields called cc_js_license_uri and cc_js_license_name that respectively store the URI and name of the license selected by the user. Just do document.getElementById("cc_js_license_uri").value (or _name instead) and you'll have the license information.

Goals

The following list of goals reminds us what we want out of JsWidget. You can expect most of it for 1.0.

  • Generate HTML suitable for use in a form which presents the basic license selector
  • Provide compatibility with all A-grade browsers
  • Provide up to date license information by
    • Utilizing licenses.xml to generate the appropriate Javascript on the server side. This may be done using a dynamic language such as PHP or through pre-processing to a static file when licenses are updated.
  • Support new, expanded metadata including attributionName, attributionUrl and morePermissions.
  • Provide a robust, scalable serving solution (if any server-side processing is needed) in order to support CC-hosted Javascript resources for the general public

Resources