WebIntents/User assigned names for services

It is worth looking at multiscreen use cases where the user is seeking to display some content, perhaps a video on one or more screens, e.g. you may have a connected TV in your bedroom, and your living room (aka lounge). These devices can be discovered via zeroconf or UPnP and registered by the web run-time, but the interesting question is how users identify the different screens, especially if they are the same model of device.

In zeroconf, each device ensures it has a unique persistent name on the local network, e.g. screen-2, and users can assign their own more meaningful name, e.g. living-room-tv. For web-intents this binding could be held by the web run-time, and synched in some way, so that the names are shared across the different web run-times used by the occupants of the home.

Note that although the above scenario refers to services provided by devices on a home network, user assigned names is of more general value and applicable to services provided by the same device that is executing the web run-time (or devices directly connected to it), and to services provided in the cloud. You can think of this as user assigned names for favourites.

You could argue that this is something for the web run-times to deal with, and not exposed by the web intents API. However, is that always the case? I suspect that users and developers will want a way for applications to make use of names for particular services, so that an application can request a binding for an intent to a named service. This has the corollary that applications can access the name of a service after the user has bound the intent. A common use case is where the user wants to resume viewing a movie provided by a given service.