Re: User agent context for rendering the presentation

On Aug 22, 2014 5:32 PM, "Mark Watson" <watsonm@netflix.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 22, 2014 at 4:48 PM, Jonas Sicking <jonas@sicking.cc> wrote:
>> > It had been suggested that we mandate something like incognito mode,
where
>> > IndexedDB etc. are cleared on the presenting UA before the
presentation page
>> > is loaded. I'm objecting to mandating that, on the grounds described
above.
>> > Of course if we don't mandate it, then people would still be free to
>> > implement it that way, but that would also be free to implement a UA
with
>> > persistent IndexedDB like on desktops/laptops and the latter would have
>> > better UX in many cases (IMO).
>>
>> The incognito mode discussion was around the 1UA case. I.e. that when
>> the presentation page runs on the controlling device, it's important
>> that it doesn't have access to data from the controlling device.
>
>
> I think this is too restrictive for the 1 UA case. Of course the
presenting page should not have access to the IndexedDB data stored by the
controlling page, but I see no reason why it should always start with an
empty IndexedDB. Why can't it see the data it stored there last time it ran
?

The assumption is that if there's an IndexedDB implementation on the TV,
there is also a web rendering engine on the TV. In which case there's no
reason to use the 1 UA solution.

A device which has an IndexedDB database, and which enables remote devices
to read/write to that database over the network, but is not able to render
webpages, sounds very theoretical.

>> I'm ok with leaving the 2 UA case undefined for now. I.e. I'm ok with
>> letting the spec leave it up to UAs to decide if the page which runs
>> on TV will see data from the TV or not.
>>
>> I think the main hurdle to enabling using data from the TV will not be
>> specification text. The main hurdle will be getting hardware vendors
>> to support this. Any help here would be greatly appreciated.
>
> I think the TV vendors might reasonably expect the use-case of
connecting to apps on the TV to be addressed before the use-case of
connecting to a fully-fledged UA on the TV, since the former is already
widely deployed.

Sure. Though this is dramatically harder given that all existing hardware
has very different capabilities, use different network protocols, and have
different apps installed.

But everyone I talk to is very interested in supporting this. Me included.
I just haven't heard any ideas how.

/ Jonas