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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

If you're reading about this looking for how Google might misuse it, and that's what you see, then it seems like you're reading it as you intended. This isn't surprising. Many things can be read more than one way with only a little imagination.

But there are other ways to read things. Like, how could I use that on my site?

I'm thinking it might be fun to do something like the infinite zoom that Scott McCloud wrote about. Or more practically, it would let everyone put site previews next to links, like Twitter and Facebook do, without needing a big infrastructure.

Or you could think about how arbitrary hackers could misuse it. The security issues seem a bit concerning. But I suppose it could be blocked like iframes?

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It's true that I could be lacking imagination. Because to me the portal proposal reads like it's simply moving the implementation of Google's AMP carousel into the browser in order to solve the address-bar problem. Your suggested use cases aren't terribly convincing, I'm afraid. Zooming UIs are perfectly possible using existing web technology. It would be interesting to have a standard way to embed Twitter/Facebook-style preview cards, but portals aren't it. A portal would just display a small portion of the page, which wouldn't be terribly useful unless the page is designed to reformat itself when displayed inside a portal viewport. If you want link previews now, there's nothing stopping web application developers from fetching the Open Graph metadata themselves.

Sorry about that, I didn't mean you have little imagination, but rather that any reading of a tech spec requires a bit of imagination.

It doesn't seem all that unreasonable for a web page to show a preview if the window size is small enough. You could do that with a media query. And then when it goes full-screen, it would already be loaded and that would just be a resize.

This would take cooperation from web sites.

No worries. I really was sincere with my original question of whether I was missing useful potential applications.

Building richer cross-site interactions into web standards and browser interfaces is an intriguing idea. A more dynamic model of hypertext, where the browser intelligently displays linked-to content. Even though portals are a highly limited version of that idea, Google has a high chance of getting them standardized and implemented by competing engines, so hopefully more useful applications can be found.

Some other appealing examples:

Embedded youtube videos could support a navigation to the video page where the video just animated from the embed to its in-page position while continuing to play.

Embedded twitter posts could be clicked on to do the same sort of transition. Really this sort of thing applies to all kinds of media embeds.

Amazon ads could do the same sort of transition to the advertised item.

Basically, this could allow multiple different domains to coordinate to get some of the fluidity that you can build on a single page. Ex. you could develop a federated social network of many different providers (or video sharing or whatever) while retaining the UX of interacting with a single thing.

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