Re: Policy and browsers (was Re: Policy work items - request for proposals)

Doug,

I wasn't trying to imply that W3C should mandate user interface. But certain
APIs lend themselves to certain experiences. <input type="file"> would be
very different if it were instead a GetFile() call. My hope is that we have
in mind at least one user experience that we would actually be comfortable
shipping that matches the API, rather than just saying "eeh, don't worry
about it, some policy layer will handle it, and if there's no policy we can
fall back to a dialog box." That is not acceptable.

2009/11/11 Doug Turner <dougt@dougt.org>

>
> On Nov 11, 2009, at 12:17 AM, Ian Fette (イアンフェッティ) wrote:
>
> > For geolocation, there are a number of approaches we could have taken. We
> could have had some sort of button that users had to click to provide the
> location to the webapp (click a specific button, get a dialog that comes up
> asking you what specificity of location you wish to provide and whether to
> remember that decision), we could have let the website say "I'm a location
> aware site" and put something in the URL bar that the user could interact
> with if they wanted to grant location (but not a full infobar / dialog),
> etc. We could even have buried it in a menu (page -> provide your location
> to this page). There are a number of ways that we could have done it that
> would have put the user more in charge, and we might still change our UI to
> come more in line with this model but it may break the expectation of
> certain apps. We'll have to see.
>
>
> Right.  I don't care how the user agent keeps the user in charge of device
> access.  For Firefox, we are going to want to ensure that some UI happens
> (and has a persistent option).  For geo, we used info bars.  Other device
> access may use the same or it may use something different.
>
> fwiw, nothing in the geolocation specification requires a dialog or info
> bar.  If you want to hang some sort of luckycharm in your url bar, that is
> perfectly great.
>
> In any case, I do not think it is for us (the w3c) to spec out how this
> type of UI should be design.  It's important to discuss, even in normative
> text, the privacy consideration when implementing device apis, but that is
> about as far as it goes.  We should not talk about info bars in the
> specification. :-)
>
> Doug