Under the HTML5 flag, browsers are bringing to our desktops or devices exciting features such
GeoLocation,
File, and
many others such camera, microphone, system access, etc ...
The Problem
While this is good from possibilities point of view, the activation approach historically sucks. Flash and it's video or microphone activation shows a dialog that asks the user to authorize media access while browsers are lazily asking via JavaScript the same. The real life scenario we all know is definitively different when a page is using a screen reader, and
this article and video about twitter
UX should be enough to open our eyes: something
is wrong.
Solutions
If we ever used an Android device, or we have download applications from whatever mobile store, we should be familiar with the
installation warnings and confirmations we suppose to read and accept in order to grant application access to anything it needs to work properly.
This simply means that once we accept we won't be bothered anymore and the application can easily work as expected.
It's all about privileges and in my opinion it would be nice to have similar approach in our browsers as well, also to make web application even closer to native one.
Proposal
Following the "
don't break the WEB" approach, all we could do is put a meta tag, as we do for viewports, specifying all those Technologies/API we would like to use in our webpage. This is an example:
<meta name="grant" content="GeoLocation,Camera" />
<meta name="grant" content="System" />
The proposal should ask at the very beginning and only once if the webpage could access these functionalities and the user can decide
before what should be available and what should not.
The "before" action is important 'cause in this Ajax era it's extremely easy to loose focus runtime with whatever activation request and this is so wrong.
The list of granted API should be reachable via userAgent via specific method such:
navigator.hasGranted("GeoLocation")
or similar, so that eventually we can decide via JavaScript if we would like to ask again runtime, as we do now, or simply provide an alternative solution or message, maybe showing an "ask again to activate" button, remembering to put back the focus in the right context.
Alternative
Web developers could implement similar concept asking with the very first script access to one or more API and put the page focus back. With GeoLocation, as example, the user will chose immediately his preferences without having surprises in the middle of a session, or later.
// As Soon As Possible
var HAS_GEO_LOCATION = false;
try {
navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(function (result) {
// so that other scripts could check if already available
HAS_GEO_LOCATION = true;
// notify the event in any case
var evt = document.createEvent("Event");
evt.initEvent("geolocationready", 1, 1);
evt.data = result;
// implicit window context
dispatchEvent(evt);
});
} catch(e) {}
A usage example could be something like:
// script loaded after a while ...
if (HAS_GEO_LOCATION) {
doFreakingCoolStuffWithGeo();
} else {
addEventListener(
"geolocationready",
doFreakingCoolStuffWithGeo,
false
);
}
We can eventually specify the handleError callback as well but actually this is part of the HAS_GEO_LOCATION value, if there is an error no reason to insist, simply assume that there is no geo location and go with the fallback, if any.
What do you think?
