To develop an effective standard, there needs to be a broad
consensus on requirements and the proposed solution across all of
the players. Agreement on a set of illustrative use cases can help
to create a shared understanding as part of the process for forging
a concensus.
I would recommend becoming a member of the W3C and joining the
proposed Ubiquitous Web Applications working group. You would then
be able to make contributions on use cases, requirements and
potential solutions and work with others on developing the
corresponding working drafts.
Note that the resulting standard could be implemented in a number of
different ways, e.g. by browser vendors, or by third parties as
browser extensions, or as cross-browser plugins. As I stated in my
last email, the security considerations need to be addressed in a
broader context than just geolocation, and we hope to discuss the
usability implications at the forthcoming W3C workshop. The call for
papers for that will be published in a few days time.
p.s. the potential uncertainty in location data (e.g. when on the
boundary between two postal code areas) suggests a similarity with
speech recognition, and the consequent idea of returning a list of
hypotheses and associated confidence scores rather than just the
highest ranking solution. A more detailed assessment of the
requirements should perhaps include a study of uncertainty.
Dave Raggett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
On Fri, 23 Feb 2007, Ryan Sarver wrote:
Dave,
Thanks for following up -- I echo your thoughts exactly. It's great to
see so much momentum and support within W3 already. I would be very
interested in the upcoming workshop -- let me know when the call for
papers opens up.
From your point of view, what should the next steps be for documenting
this and getting the ball rolling in terms of working towards
standardization?
-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Raggett [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, February 23, 2007 9:02 AM
To: Ryan Sarver
Cc: [email protected]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Re: [whatwg] Geolocation in the browser
On Wed, 21 Feb 2007, Ryan Sarver wrote:
Robert,
I hear you ... the idea is really two fold -- the first part is to
standardize how web applications access the location information,
regardless of how it is determined. The second is to offer a
standard way of different location acquiring technologies -- GPS,
Wifi positioning, geocoding an user-entered address, etc -- to
deliver location to the browser. In this case I am proposing using
the NMEA standard as it is well documented and would allow for
compatibility with existing GPS devices.
Following on from Michael Smith's email on proosed W3C work in this
area, I thought it might be helpful to provide a litte context.
There is a great deal of interest in location based web applications
and the challenge is how to expose this to browsers in a way that is
independent of how the location is determined. Web applications may
need control over what format the information is provided, and how
often it is updated when the device is moving.
There are obviously lots of security concerns over location and this
is part of a broader context of giving web applications richer
access to device capabilities. A common approach is to ask the user
for permission each time the application is run. That raises
usability concerns, such as is the user able to discern whether the
application is bona fide website or whether it is a phishing site
masquerading as a bona fide website. This is a real problem for
desktop browsers and is likely to be an even greater challenge on
the smaller displays on mobile devices. Walled gardens provide a
partial solution, but don't scale to the Internet as a whole.
W3C's April 2006 workshop on transpency and usability of web
authentication looked at some of the issues, see:
http://www.w3.org/2005/Security/usability-ws/report
We are now planning a further workshop for June 5-6 in Dublin,
Ireland to follow up with a broader look at the issues involved in
declative models of distributed web applications. A public call for
papers will be issued in the near future. An brief outline is given
at:
http://www.w3.org/2006/10/uwa-charter.html#workshops
Dave Raggett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://www.w3.org/People/Raggett
