Re: [manifest] orientation member

On Tuesday, December 3, 2013 at 10:20 PM, Mounir Lamouri wrote:

> On Tue, Dec 3, 2013, at 15:48, Jonas Sicking wrote:
> > My impression has been that the vast majority of apps only need a
> > single orientation that is independent of media-query results. If
> > that's the case, then I think the above is too complicated. I.e. if
> > that is the common case, then we should support:
> >  
> > "orientation": ["landscape"],
> >  
> > or maybe even
> >  
> > "orientation": "landscape",
>  
> I definitely agree with that. Though, we should allow both syntaxes
> (array and string).

 I don’t like the idea of supporting two types, but can live with it. My preference is just having an array, and having unknown values ignored - at least that gives us some kind of extensibility mechanism.   
> If we want a more complex system later, we could move to that.

As above - so long as whatever we come up with is somewhat future proof.   
> For the
> moment, I think we should keep it simple. Also, when comparing how
> applications handle landscape/portrait, it is worth considering how
> common/easy it is to write responsive UI on the platform.

It’s only technically easy. Design and UX wise it’s actually really hard in practice - and doing it cross platform/cross device is even harder because support for layout application technology remains in its infancy (i.e., Flexbox support is really lacking on mobile, and who knows how long that situation will continue for).  
  
In addition, the data we are seeing from applications that declare "apple-mobile-webapp-capable" show that developers are not doing this. Or, worst case, when apps are being rotated, they have to display a “rotate your phone the other way” message.   
> iOS has a very
> limited number of device sizes so I am not really surprised that iOS
> applications try to optimize for some sizes (thus arbitrary ignore some
> others). Is that common on Android?

Yes, it appears to be common on Android too.   
> Would that be common using Web
> applications?

Web apps don’t really have a choice. But you can try out your favorite apps on a phone in landscape move and see how usable they are: they may be usable (and some actually do provide a little adaptability - like BBC news), but it’s probably just coincidental that they work that was and not the way you would normally use them (unless its’ a game, of course).  

In any case, as you suggest, let’s build this up incrementally - but let’s make sure that we have a migratory path to give developers a choice to better control orientation.

Received on Monday, 13 January 2014 09:45:49 UTC