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
