Re: Draft Charter of Emergency Information TF (was: Re: [DRAFT] Disaster Prevention and Response TF charter

2011/10/4 Giuseppe Pascale <giuseppep@opera.com>:
> My understanding of this TF work is not to create new standards/protocols in
> the area of emergency notification,
> but to review the existing ones and see if anything needs to be done to
> support such notifications in a web browsers.
>
> One of the outcome could also be: nothing needs to be done.
>
> My personal feeling on this is that notifications should not be handled at
> web application level but at a UA level (for end user notifications, I
> mean).

I wonder how this would work. Are you suggesting that every browser
(UA) when it goes online registers with a national notification
service from which it would get emergency notifications if there are
any to be delivered? Seeing as the Web is fundamentally a
pull-information based infrastructure, pushing information can only
work if the UA allows it (e.g. RSS feed style). However, as soon as
you make the information-push UA-dependent and not user-dependent, you
run into all sorts of privacy issues.

For example, if all UAs in the US had to register with a US agency as
soon as they go online, that single agency would know everything about
when everyone in the US is going online, their IP addresses and their
devices.

Why not just go with a Web application, such as an RSS feed to which
you can subscribe that gives you emergency notifications to those
channels that you usually communicate on (could, e.g. be twitter,
facebook, google+, email, RSS reader etc)?


> So I don't think there is an impact on html5 or other presentation
> technologies.

I agree. I don't think there is any impact on html5 no matter what.


> Anyway I welcome a broader discussion on this to make sure we didn't miss
> anything.

Agreed. :-)

Cheers,
Silvia.

Received on Tuesday, 4 October 2011 12:14:35 UTC