Hi, Screen orientation lock is critical to a whole set of mobile games (especially those which rely on the accelerometer to control the gameplay). It's great that it is now considered for specification and implementation.
I had collected some use cases a while back[1], some of which led to use-cases[2], requirements[3] and suggestions[4] in the Coremob report. While some of the original use cases required dynamically modifying orientation lock (e.g. the Game within a game experience[5]), key use cases simply require a declarative, page-wide setting, as described by David Bruant on the WHAT WG mailing list[6]. The current proposal[7] only targets the dynamic setting through a JS API and leaves the more declarative approach to other specs[8]. It mentions the Web Application Manifest Format and Management APIs[9] and CSS Device Adaptation[10]. Now, CSS Device Adaptation, as used in the Viewport META element[11] is ubiquitous on mobile. It seems like a natural fit for a declarative orientation lock, so much so that it's already specified in the spec[12]. However, the syntax to dynamically read or modify the Viewport META element is cumbersome and error prone (you're talking document.cookie-like string splitting/concatenation with unspecified separators, etc.[12]). Instead of providing a dedicated API to cater strictly for the screen orientation lock use case, wouldn't it make more sense and be more consistent to provide a CSSOM[14] API for the whole Viewport META element, and use matchMedia listeners[15] instead of orientationchange events? This would allow declarative setting through the Viewport META element, dynamic modification through the CSSOM API, and event handling through the matchMedia interface, all of which are well known and commonly used by developers. Thanks for your time. --tobie --- [1]: http://tobie.github.io/ORIENTATIONLOCK-UCR/index.html [2]: http://coremob.github.io/coremob-2012/FR-coremob-20130131.html#play-a-2d-game [3]: http://coremob.github.io/coremob-2012/FR-coremob-20130131.html#req-orientation-lock [4]: http://coremob.github.io/coremob-2012/FR-coremob-20130131.html#screen-orientation [5]: http://tobie.github.io/ORIENTATIONLOCK-UCR/index.html#game-within-a-game-experience [6]: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/2013Apr/0078.html [7]: https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/screen-orientation/raw-file/tip/Overview.html [8]: https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/screen-orientation/raw-file/tip/Overview.html#declarative-orientation-locking [9]: https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/app-manifest/raw-file/tip/index.html [10]: http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-device-adapt/ [11]: http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-device-adapt/#viewport-meta [12]: http://dev.w3.org/csswg/css-device-adapt/#the-lsquoorientationrsquo-descriptor [13]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mobile/Viewport_meta_tag#Background [14]: http://dev.w3.org/csswg/cssom/ [15]: http://dev.w3.org/csswg/cssom-view/#the-mediaquerylist-interface
