Re: [w3c/permissions] Permission API has terminology issues one could drive a truck through. (#85)

Way better title, thanks.

I'll reply to https://github.com/w3c/mediacapture-main/issues/334#issuecomment-213106791 in this thread to keep the permissions discussion over here.

> By "access" I mean the site can access the user's camera or mic. By "persistent permission" I mean the UA policy setting (prompt, grant, or deny) for dealing with new requests for access. If you are using any other terms, please define them.

This spec tries to use "permission" to mean the ability to access the capability, whether that's the camera, mic, location, notifications, etc. "persistent permission" is such an ability that will survive a page reload. "temporary permission" is such an ability that won't survive a reload, but you've pointed out that there are possibly two levels of temporary-ness: one where a new call to, e.g. `navigator.watchLocation`, within the same realm causes a new prompt, vs one where it wouldn't.

As I've said, the spec does a bad job of accommodating temporary permissions, but we're working on fixing that. It's always *tried* to accommodate them, with, for example ["User agents may use a form of storage to keep track of web site permissions."](https://rawgit.com/w3c/permissions/417bf77d51/index.html#permission-store), but it's always needed more to carry that through.

> Let me walk through, for instance, the [request algorithm](https://w3c.github.io/permissions/#permission-request-algorithm) to illustrate how little sense it makes:

What you're seeing here is that the algorithms aren't finished. (That's what "TODO" means.) The most finished one is the [`"bluetooth"`](https://webbluetoothcg.github.io/web-bluetooth/#dom-permissionname-bluetooth) permission, but even that one suffers from 1) `"granted"`/`"prompt"`/`"denied"` being an imperfect match for chooser permissions, 2) ["revoke a permission"](https://w3c.github.io/permissions/#revoke-a-permission) not passing the details of what piece of the permission to revoke, and 3) there being only one permission store, which doesn't cover the nuances of temporary permissions.

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Received on Friday, 22 April 2016 19:58:17 UTC