Re: Charter addition proposal: screen orientation lock

Hi,

On Jan 30, 2012, at 12:43 , Kenneth Rohde Christiansen wrote:
> Orientation lock is already part of the CSS Device Adaption spec as part of the viewport meta tag

Sorry, I should indeed have mentioned that as part of the background. The problem with specifying orientation as part of the viewport at rule is that it leads to circular dependencies (you can set an orientation inside a media query that changes the viewport and triggers and endless loop). The spec tries (meekly) to defend against that, but I find it difficult not to get the impression that this leads to a tangled mess and that it will confuse developers (it certainly confuses me when I try to make sense of the circularity avoidance recommendations made in the specification itself). This could be solved if it were only to appear in meta elements, but right now that's not the case and the section on meta elements in CSS DA isn't normative.

My understanding has therefore been that orientation might get dropped from CSS DA. If that's not the case and if people are confident that it can be better addressed there (perhaps by being only a meta element solution) then I'm fine with it. My sole concern is that this be solved *somewhere* (and preferably not in a manner that makes it possible to construct a GOTO instruction in CSS).

> , though this is only going to be optional and should be ignored for normal web browsing due to the effect on usability (think about navigating session history). It is thus mostly useful for fullscreen applications and stand alone web apps.

I can certainly see how this would be ignored in a number of contexts, but I wouldn't restrict it to "stand alone" web apps. Web apps in the browser ought to be able to use it, though it might require them to be identified as apps (using whatever heuristics).

> On the other hand, I think it would be nice to have a hint to the fullscreen api requestFullscreen where you could define a preferred orientation (which it would then lock to), something like requestFullscreen(HORIZONTAL). It would even be nice if the UA could tell whether it was possible to enter horizontal fullscreen mode or not, so that there can be some kind of fallback. Having it this way, it would be possible to click/tap on some element and animate the transition (scale + rotation) into the final state.

I think that this makes sense. I guess that feedback should make its way to the HTML WG.

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

Received on Monday, 30 January 2012 12:22:50 UTC