Re: Standby API Specification Proposal

Hello Dariel,

On mar., 2014-02-04 at 08:56 -0800, Dariel Marlow wrote:
> Hello Device APIs working group. I wish to propose a way for web
> applications to interact with device standby behavior. The app may
> request that the device not enter standby should the user not provide
> input via touch or peripherals. Hopefully I’ve provided the document
> in an appropriate format. If not, or if this is the wrong working
> group, please advise.

Thank you for your proposal! It would be helpful for a number of IPR
reasons if you could disclose the name of your employer (if you have
one).

Let me explain a few things that stand between such a proposal and
actual standardisation work, and then ideas on how to move forward with
it:
* before a W3C Working Group can start working on an API (or any spec in
general), that API needs to have been included in the charter of its
group; among other reasons, this is to ensure that the API is covered by
the Royalty-Free licensing commitment enabled by the W3C Patent Policy. 

* As of today, the Device APIs Working Group charter doesn't include in
its charter such an item: http://www.w3.org/2011/07/DeviceAPICharter

* As far as I can determine, no other W3C Working Group has it as part
of its charter either

* To add this to our WG charter (which would be a reasonable addition
given our overall mission) would require us to go through a rechartering
process, a relatively involved process

* To justify the cost of going through this, we would want to get some
clear interest from others, in particular browser vendors, that they do
want to implement such an API.

Now, for some good news:
* your document include use cases which seem pretty reasonable and that
I can guess others would find interesting as well

* Firefox OS ships an API with similar goals, navigator.requestWakeLock:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator.requestWakeLock

* likewise, Chrome Apps have a requestKeepAwake API available to them:
https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/power.html

So there are clear precedents in this space, and maybe this thread can
serve to gather confirmations that browser vendors would be interested
on this; I'll try to gather feedback on this in other avenues, and
hopefully you could as well try and get such feedback.

Now, on your specific proposed API, there are probably a number of
changes that would be required to make it more Web-idiomatic; and given
that there are other APIs out there, it might be that we would start
from one of them rather than this specific approach.

Hopefully this clarifies how we would go about such a proposal, as well
as how you could help in making it happen. 

Let me know if you have any question on this.

Regards,

Dom

Received on Wednesday, 5 February 2014 10:52:45 UTC