RE: Comments about Network Information API

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Mounir Lamouri [mailto:mounir@lamouri.fr] 
Sent: Donnerstag, 22. März 2012 15:06
To: public-device-apis@w3.org
Subject: Re: Comments about Network Information API

On 03/22/2012 02:55 PM, Cheng, Diana, Vodafone Group wrote:
> How is an arbitrary value useful for a web application?

Web applications might be interested to know if the connection is more around a few dozen of kb/s, a few hundreds of kb/s or a few Mb/s. If the connection is 120 kb/s or 110 kb/s is unlikely important. The UA can easily guess an average bandwidth based on network type for mobile connections.

> Whether you raise the event or not, you need to test the bandwidth frequently enough, and then you determine if the change is significant enough or not. I'm not sure how you can avoid this frequent bandwidth test, and it will generate a lot of traffic and drain the battery. 

That's a good point. This said, implementations can do only one bandwidth check per connection type change or very rarely. I would tend to say it is mostly an implementation issue but I would be glad to hear viable spec alternatives to fix that.

> Also, don't you need the underlying native implementations to support this functionality as well? That is not the case currently, for example Android just exposes the type and subtype of connection.

What do you mean?

>>I guess the UA could do the bandwidth test itself, but it is more convenient to rely on proxying to the underlying native implementation, which is already providing you with the connection type (on Android for example). Here, I'm also not sure how 'metered' will be determined by the UA. If the user has to be asked, this will be done for every browsing context I guess and I don't find this ideal. 

Thanks,
Diana Cheng.

Received on Thursday, 22 March 2012 14:34:06 UTC