Re: Value returned by navigator.doNotTrack

On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 3:28 PM, Richard Barnes
<richard.barnes@gmail.com> wrote:
> How about just using NaN?  That would be consistent with just calling
> parseInt() on the content of the header ("0", "1", or "").

If we made navigator.doNotTrack a number (0, 1, NaN), then

  if (navigator.doNotTrack)

would work correctly.  But then the negation,

  if (!navigator.doNotTrack)

is not right.  :)

> On Wed, Dec 21, 2011 at 2:00 PM, Justin Lebar <jlebar@mozilla.com> wrote:
>> In Firefox, we implemented navigator.doNotTrack to return either
>>
>>  "unspecified", if the user has not opted in to DNT, or
>>  "yes", if the user has opted in to DNT.
>>
>> The proposed DNT spec has us return "1" if the user has opted in to
>> DNT and doesn't seem to specify what we should return otherwise.
>>
>> I propose the spec be modified to explicitly state what UAs should
>> return if the user has not opted in to DNT, and to use unspecified/yes
>> instead of ??/1.
>>
>> DNT is a tri-state, not a boolean.  The DNT http header may be 1, 0,
>> or not present.  0 indicates that the user has explicitly opted in to
>> tracking.  Although Firefox doesn't support this option at the moment,
>> we'd like to spec DNT in such a way as to allow users to explicitly
>> opt in to tracking.  We propose that navigator.doNotTrack == "no"
>> correspond to DNT: 0.
>>
>> It's confusing that navigator.doNotTrack's value doesn't correspond to
>> the value of the HTTP header, but we did this because we wanted to
>> protect against buggy JS which assumes navigator.doNotTrack is a
>> boolean.  If we were to use navigator.doNotTrack == '' for users who
>> have neither oped in nor out of DNT, then sites could do |if
>> (navigator.doNotTrack) { // don't track me }|.  This would make it
>> difficult for us to introduce navigator.doNotTrack = "no" in the
>> future, because "no" resolves to the boolean |true|.
>>
>> I've filed a webkit bug on this issue [1].
>>
>> [1] https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=75008
>>

Received on Wednesday, 21 December 2011 20:47:52 UTC