[whatwg] Popular Background Geolocation question on StackOverflow

Andy Valencia ajv-cautzeamplog at vsta.org
Sat Mar 24 14:32:29 PDT 2018


[Philipp Serafin <phil127 at gmail.com>:]
> If this problem is specific to the "track a route" use-case, and the
> use-case is sufficiently widespread, would a dedicated "route recording"
> API make sense?
>
> E.g., a web page could ask the browser to continously record location
> changes and - at some time at the browser's discretion - push a list of
> recorded changes to the page.

Playing audio is already a special case; the tab with the active
<audio> element will almost certainly not have its setTimeout's
honored until it comes back to foreground.  But the "ended" event
will get to run, at least long enough to move to the next track.
In fact, it can XHR and get to run/play-next on the completion.

(But wait, on slower tablets Firefox doesn't allow quite enough
CPU to keep the background mp3 playing.  Oops.)

Or think about the iterations in the space of downloads (XHR,
service worker background fetch, background sync).

There are lots of apps using long-polling which would also like
to have some explicit (standards based) answers to their needs
to run when not the current tab--messaging and telemetry apps,
for instance.

And here we are thinking about a hand crafted solution for GPS backgrounding.

We're all well aware of the behaviors which make browsers adopt such
defensive measures.  Are we looking at enough use-cases to think about some
sort of general authorization for background resource consumption, rather than
continuing the point solution approach?

$0.02,
Andy Valencia


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