Re: [Beacon] Interaction with Service Worker

+jake, alex

On Fri, May 16, 2014 at 5:14 PM, Kornel Lesiński <kornel@geekhood.net>wrote:

>
> It's not immediately obvious how the beacons should be "seen" by Service
> Workers and how UAs should interact with them, so it'd be nice if the spec
> gave some guidance about this.
>
> My suggestion is:
>
> The Service Worker should be able to intercept beacon requests. The
> implementation of service worker should forward these requests immediately.
> Even when Service Worker is used, the UA should still be in charge of error
> handling and when it decides to retry sending the beacon it should make
> another request.
>

I think that's implicit. All network requests should pass through SW, not
sure we need a special carve out?


> Basically, just passing the request through should be an ideal
> implementation of the service worker.
>
> The alternative would be to make Service Worker responsible for queueing
> and retrying beacon requests, which may seem like a good idea at first.
> However, IMHO, that would be a sharp jump in difficulty for authors:
>
> - authors would have to reinvent UA's logic for managing network
> traffic/priorities and strategy for optimal use of cellular radio power.
> That's currently not even possible, and even if it was, that's a pretty
> complex problem to throw at authors.
>
> - authors may use Service Workers for other reasons than interception of
> beacons, so reliability of sendBeacon should not be negatively affected by
> mere presence of a Service Worker.
>
> - having simple, useful default behavior without reliance on a service
> worker is very useful, and doesn't stop authors from implementing
> additional logic in the SW if they wish.
>

It seems like, at the very least, there should be some special flag on the
beacon request, such that SW could identify beacon requests and carve out a
special path for them? That would allow you to inherit default sendBeacon
logic implemented by the browser. Alternatively, SW could synthesize a 200
response and then "roll its own" logic?

ig