Re: VC meeting to discuss Permissions spec

Thanks for writing all these up!

>From the descritption in your mail:

- the critical point on 95 is probably not so much when stores are created,
but when they are destroyed.

- 97 seems like "do what I mean". If adopted, it means that each UA must
design its storage model on its own, and consistency goes out the window.
Not happy with that.

- I don't get what you mean by calling the camera permission a "feature".
Care to explain further?
(In my mind, the "feature" is all of the aspects of camera management;
permission is only one small part of it, and the only one I want to have
the permissions spec say anything about.)



On Fri, May 27, 2016 at 3:11 AM, Jeffrey Yasskin <jyasskin@google.com>
wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I've been updating the Permissions spec to improve its support for
> complex permissions like Bluetooth, for temporary grants as seen in
> Safari and Firefox, and for UA innovation.
>
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_YTpXijrkKNlmSlpA0fEwc5WMmZvRvdTRwF81g_gndk/edit
> surveys the existing practice with permissions and describes some
> tricky aspects of various future plans. I've proposed 3 fairly
> different models, and I think it's surpassed everyone's ability to
> investigate them enough to develop a preference.
>
> So I'd like to schedule a meeting with interested folks some time in
> the next 2 weeks so that we can all focus enough to pick one of the
> models.
>
> What times work for people? Please fill out
> http://doodle.com/poll/e2r74364qzkmxga9 to express a preference. We
> can meet via
> https://talkgadget.google.com/hangouts/_/google.com/permissionsspec.
>
> The models I've written up are:
>
> * https://github.com/w3c/permissions/pull/95: Each feature defines a
> storage type, and permission stores store it. The UA doesn't need any
> permission stores, but if it has them, it needs one per global object,
> probably plus one per origin, and can save grants to multiple stores
> and initialize new stores pretty freely. This version also needs
> https://github.com/w3c/permissions/pull/91 to let other specs modify
> their storage types appropriately.
>
> * https://github.com/w3c/permissions/pull/96: Defines a permission
> store for each global object, but leaves it up to the UA how those are
> created. Stores hold a collection of entries for each feature, rather
> than a unified "storage" type, which helps with granting access to
> discrete devices. This spec spends some words requiring that
> permission changes only happen on event loop turn boundaries, but
> that's not very useful to developers since every algorithm using
> permissions runs 'in parallel'.
>
> * https://github.com/w3c/permissions/pull/97: Feature specs use
> "descriptor's permission state" and "descriptor's extra permission
> data" to read the UA's notion of the user's intent, but there's no
> model of the UA's storage. Individual permissions can add constraints:
> for example, "camera" and "microphone" require that iframes without
> the allowusermedia attribute return "denied". This option treats
> permission the most like UI, which we traditionally don't specify.
>
> #97 was written last, so it also includes some other improvements,
> like calling things like "camera" features instead of permissions, and
> defining algorithms for other specs to use to show permission prompts.
> I'll port those to whichever version we pick if you like them.
>
> Please let me know when you're free to talk, and give the options some
> thought ahead of the meeting, and hopefully we can settle on something
> lots of specs can use.
>
> Thanks,
> Jeffrey
>