Re: ACTION-390: alternative UA affordances for DNT choice

On Apr 25, 2013, at 10:54 AM, Rigo Wenning wrote:

> Alan, 
> 
> let me try with some alternative wording to overcome this 
> misunderstanding: 
> 
> To turn DNT on: 
> 
> 1/ A user must be informed clearly and accurately about the choices 
> available before turning DNT on or off. 
> 
> 2/ When making the choice, the user must have access to explanatory text 
> to provide more detailed information about DNT functionality and the 
> parties involved in the DNT functionality
> 
> This takes away the "user agent". Your understanding of the Web is 
> narrowed by the entrenched discussion around defaults. But the issue 
> here is not defaults, but that the Web can run on everything. Thus you 
> have to address the requirements in a more neutral way so that it 
> doesn't say user agent, as your fridge is not the user agent in the 
> classic sense of a browser. 

That is not what user agent means (a fridge is a user agent if it
can initiate HTTP requests).  Ed's point was not that the user
agent might not be a browser, but rather that the mechanism for
setting a DNT configuration used by the user agent is not inside
the user agent (and thus not subject to constraints that only target
the UI of a user agent). Hence, Rigo's text is closer to the mark
because it can apply to the act of configuring a personal proxy
or via an external interface to a user agent.

However, this entire discussion seems to be ignoring our prior
decisions on ISSUE-4. If we are going to have requirements on the
configuration of a user preference, they need to be consistent with
the protocol expressed in TPE.  So, at minimum, you have to
incorporate all of the options regarding how those preferences
might be set, as described in section 3 of TPE.

The reason we have section 3 in TPE is because the semantics of a
header field are defined by how, why, and when that field is sent.
These cannot be separated from the protocol, since they are the
most important part of any protocol (syntax is often trivially
rearranged at the end of discussing what should be communicated).

....Roy

Received on Thursday, 25 April 2013 20:36:52 UTC