Re: [w3c/permissions] Drop .request() (#83)

It almost goes without saying, but I concluded some time ago that I think Roc was wrong in his arguments against requesting permissions. The inability to "ask first, open later" is making applications more convoluted, not less.

Jan-Ivar also misinterprets what I meant with the comment about "acquire sources they don't need" - if permission is lost when relinquishing them, the applications that fall into this trap will *hang on to the devices* (which will work both in Chrome and Firefox). This consumes system resources for no better reason than working around a mildly inconvenient API.

I also think that the idea of returning a capability from requestPermission() has merit, but the polyfill illustrates that it's not the same thing as opening the device - when we're dealing with real hardware like a camera that has lots of configuration settings on its own, opening it has side effects and takes time. Checking whether or not you have permission to open it should be fast and have no side effects; requesting permission is likely to involve human interaction, so isn't fast - but it should not have side effects.

Developers are not lazy, but they have priorities; the greatest praise I've had for the WebRTC API was a developer who said "the WebRTC part of my app took 5 minutes, which meant I could spend my time on working on the other aspects instead".



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