On Mar 7, 2008, at 2:38 AM, Doug Schepers wrote:
Hi, Aaron-
Aaron Boodman wrote (on 3/6/08 8:55 PM):
I work on Google Gears team. If you're not familiar with what Gears
is, you can learn more here: http://code.google.com/apis/gears.
We've been working on an API that will allow an application to obtain
(with permission) the user's current location. I posted this to the
WhatWG mailing list, but it was suggested that this might be a more
appropriate place.
Anyway, here's our current design:
http://code.google.com/p/google-gears/wiki/LocationAPI
We think there's a lot of potential for interesting applications with
a API like this. Some examples would be recommendations for nearby
restaurants, turn by turn directions, or city walking tours.
Are there any other vendors interested in implementing something like
this? If so, we'd like to work together to come up with a standard.
Otherwise, I'll just put this out there for comment for the time
being. We'd appreciate any feedback on the design, one way or the
other.
This is interesting stuff, and I agree it is very useful to have.
There is already some activity happening in this area, in the
Ubiquitous Web Applications Working Group (UWA or UbiWeb). [1] It's
obviously a hot topic, and one I personally hope can be specified
and deployed quickly (since we're already about 15 years behind
Japan in this stuff ^_^ ).
I think you hit the nail regarding vendors... that's a crucial next
step.
I'm happy to facilitate bringing your insight in this area to W3C,
and I'm sure we can find the best way to move this forward, and get
involvement from other vendors. Feel free to drop me a line
offlist, and I can do a bit more research and point you in the right
direction.
[1] http://www.w3.org/2007/uwa/
I am much more interested in Aaron's proposal than in DCCI (comments
forthcoming).
Regards,
Maciej
