[whatwg] Bandwidth media queries

[James Graham]

On 05/21/2012 04:34 PM, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
> On 5/21/12 10:09 AM, Mounir Lamouri wrote:
>> On 05/20/2012 03:04 PM, Boris Zbarsky wrote:
>>> On 5/20/12 5:45 AM, Paul Irish wrote:
>>>> Since no one mentioned it, I just wanted to make sure this thread is
>>>> aware
>>>> of the Network Information API [1], which provides
>>>> navigator.connection.bandwidth
>>>>
>>>> It's been recently implemented (to some degree) in both Mozilla [2] and
>>>> Webkit [3].
>>>
>>> As far as I can tell, the Mozilla implementation always returns Infinity
>>> for .bandwidth.
>>
>> This is not true. There is an implementation for Firefox Android which
>> is based on the connection type.
>
> Ah, indeed. I had missed that codepath.
>
> If I'm reading the right code now, that looks like it returns a constant
> value for each connection type (e.g. if you're connected via Ethernet or
> Wifi it returns 20; if you're connected via EDGE it returns 0.2, etc).

This suggests that the API is extremely silly; although one could 
presumably claim that "an estimate" allows one to return anything, I 
don't see how returning "20" if the server is feeding you 1 byte/second 
can be helpful to anyone. If no one plans to implement this as a loose 
proxy for "type of connection" the spec shouldn't pretend to do more 
than that.

Can you point me to the discussion of usecases that led to this design?