Re: skeleton Geolocation API

On Thu, 26 Jun 2008 17:56:48 -0700, "Aaron Boodman" <aa@google.com> wrote:
> 
> I am most interested in providing a way for web applications to get
> the current location of the user. I get the impression that this is
> what the other UA vendors here are interested in as well, but they
> should chime in one way or the other.
> 
> Having a URI scheme for location is an interesting concept, but it
> does not seem like the simplest way to expose this information.  I
> also see no privacy benefit to exposing information this way.
> 

I agree with Erik here. There are advantages to allowing use of URIs to specify location. Privacy is one of them: I would be comfortable providing a location like "loc://dret.com/home" to any webapp, because only the webapps I trust will know where I actually live. To the rest of the webapps, I could be anywhere in the world, so my privacy is not breached in the least. If I were limited to a lat/long system, then *any* location I provide (even if it's just to one significant figure) does provide information about where I am, even to webapps that I may not trust.

Granted, the UI presented to the user to allow this sort of granularity would probably be quite complicated, but I think that would fall outside the scope of this debate since the spec itself isn't really concerned with UI.

kats

Received on Friday, 27 June 2008 01:19:49 UTC