Re: [mediacapture-main] Is more needed regarding revocation?

> we need to say that when a permission is revoked, that also stops 
active usage of that permission, such as a track that is sourced from 
the device.

@alvestrand I'm not impressed by the clarity of this new terminology. 
In the above sentence, I can't tell whether you're talking about 
*persistent permission* or *access*.

The permissions API is a web-facing (still read-only!) API that seems 
to define the [status of a 
permission](https://www.w3.org/TR/permissions/#status-of-a-permission)
 to be one of `'prompt'`, `'granted'`, or `'denied'`. If I may 
reverse-engineer a definition out of that, then a "permission" in that
 API is *how the UA will respond to a future request for access*.

It should be clear to anyone that this is a *persistent permission* 
definition.

To "revoke permission" then really means to "revoke persistent 
permission", specifically: change `'granted'` back to `'prompt'`, and 
that is the only thing it means.

The *Permissions API* is really the *Persistent Permissions API*.

Why terminology matters:
---
When a user chooses "Stop sharing" in the "in-call" Firefox 
doorhanger, they are ***revoking access***. Sharing == access. They 
implicitly also *revoke persistent permission* if persistent 
permission has been `'granted'` to the site (sets it back to 
`'prompt'`), because UX is hard, and Mozilla thought this was the most
 conservative user-protecting behavior.

Firefox doesn't currently have an *about:permissions* page (it was 
removed), but when we did have it, "revoking persistent permission" in
 it (that is: changing from `'granted'` to `'prompt'` didn't stop any 
active tracks. Why should it? I don't see how that follows user 
intent.

Now compare my terminology above with yours:

> Given the way I solved "temporary permission", it means that it 
makes sense to revoke a permission that is not currently granted; this
 argues for putting the "revoke" stuff in the Mediacapture doc in 
addition to being in the permissions API doc.

A "temporary permission" doesn't make any sense to me at all.
Having to "revoke a permission that is not currently granted" doesn't 
make any sense to me at all.

These seem to be clarity problems coming from poor terminology, 
specifically: conflating *persistent permission* with *access*. 

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Received on Thursday, 21 April 2016 16:32:17 UTC