Charter addition proposal: screen orientation lock

Hi all!

Sorry for bringing this to the group this late, but it's a topic that's been discussed in other places and that I believe is both useful and mature enough to be ready for standardisation.

Some applications are designed in such a way that they only make sense in one device orientation. The archetypical example would be a game that only works in landscape mode, but there are other examples. Right now native apps can support this rather easily, but web apps have been stuck with silly hacks such as detecting that the orientation is wrong and asking the user to rotate. This further leads to trouble when the device itself is used as a controller (e.g. in racing games) as this can sometimes trigger an undesired orientation change mid-game — hardly a user-friendly experience.

Note that this is not about system-level orientation lock (which would be fodder for another group) but application-level orientation.

Options to address this have been discussed (amongst other places) here:

    http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.webapi/browse_thread/thread/f38bb05e66c01a77#

There is discussion as to whether this ought to be only an API or if it should use a <meta> element (which would also give it an API since it could be changed dynamically), with an overall leaning towards the latter. I am rather confident that we should be able to agree on the best approach relatively quickly.

I will let implementers speak for themselves, but my understanding is that there is interest in this feature. It is certainly a regular request from developers.

In previous discussions we haven't hashed out who would stand up as editor and test facilitator, but I'm confident that we can find people. If no one else steps up, I'll take the testing hat.

WDYT?

-- 
Robin Berjon - http://berjon.com/ - @robinberjon

Received on Monday, 30 January 2012 11:32:28 UTC