Re: Location providers and competition

Hi Martin,

On Tue, Oct 21, 2008 at 7:19 AM, Thomson, Martin
<Martin.Thomson@andrew.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
>
> Assuming that multiple providers exist, how does a browser arbitrate between multiple location providers?  Serial execution is likely to guarantee that the solution fails miserably.  Is this decision made by the user?  Is this decision exposed on the API?
>

Interesting point. To me, this is an implementation detail and should
not be exposed through the API. We should be concerned with the Web
developer-facing behavior of the API but I don't think we need to go
as far as defining the arbitration logic between providers. One design
goal of the API is to abstract away all the details of how the
location is acquired and present a simple, easy to use interface to
developers. Exposing arbitration decision through the API would break
this model and defeat our goal.

> This question might not directly relate to the geolocation API, but a decision needs to be made whether it does or not.

As said above, my opinion is that this issue, although very
interesting, is not relevant to the API design. But I'm sure the
various parties implementing this API (Mozilla, Gears, etc) would be
more than happy to discuss this issue on their developer forums.

Thanks,
Andrei

Received on Tuesday, 21 October 2008 10:44:16 UTC