DeviceOrientation: next steps?

Hi All,

We had some discussion last year on cleaning up parts of the specification and even enhancing it (e.g. quaternions), but there was also some hesitancy in going forward with wholesale changes to the spec based on last year’s F2F at TPAC.  Since that time, work has progressed within the Devices API (DAP) Working Group context on the Generic Sensor API [1].  DeviceOrientation has been suggested as a suitable candidate for ‘retrofitting’ [2].

Note that the Generic Sensor API at this point is a work in progress.  Nevertheless, the DAP group is re-chartering and it has been suggested that as part of potential new work topics that it would not only finish out the Generic Sensor API but also start to retrofit certain API’s.  This would include DeviceOrientation, but not Geolocation (see item 7 of [3]).

There still leaves the issue of the existing DeviceOrientation specification.  It has achieved widespread deployment in mobile devices [4].  However, there is still the issue of non-compliant implementations, and this doesn’t look likely to be fixed (e.g. see [5]).  Nevertheless, I would like to gauge support for the following:


a)      Stopping all work or investigations on any new features for DeviceOrientation, and letting the DAP Working Group take over the retrofitting of DeviceOrientation to the Generic Sensor API.

b)      Elevating the existing DeviceOrientation Specification to Last Call.  {Note: this may seem strange given the non-compliant implementations, but I feel that it will spur implementers to suggest textual changes that would allow for compliance if they actually believe that spec conformance is important}.

Comments/feedback/suggestions are welcome.

-Giri Mandyam, Geolocation WG Chair

[1] https://github.com/w3c/sensors

[2] https://github.com/w3c/sensors/issues/1

[3] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-device-apis/2015Jun/0175.html

[4] http://caniuse.com/#feat=deviceorientation

[5] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-geolocation/2014Jul/0009.html