[whatwg] Geolocation API Proposal

[Benjamin West]

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 1:03 AM, Aaron Boodman <aa at google.com> wrote:
> I've posted this to the W3C WebAPI mailing list as well. Still looking
>  forward to feedback on the actual content of the proposal, in either
>  place.
>
>  Thanks,
>
>  - a
>

What use cases are drive this proposal?
If the use case is for user agents to describe their geographical
location to applications, then one possible solution is to wield web
architecture, and use an HTTP header.
User agents might send something like:

    X-Agent-Lat: 1234123
    X-Agent-Lon: -2132362

This frames the problem in terms of an application being interested in
the properties of the client, instead of the client needing to know
about properties of the client so they can eventualy send a request to
an application with the same information.

That said, if the client does need to know, it might be easier to
simply give user script the ability to sniff and edit outbound headers,
with which you can build the proposed API.

Most of the features in you proposal seem to deal with geocoding, and
I've ignored that here.  The notion of sensitivity to time was
interesting, but I suspect HTTP headers would be adequate for that as
well.

Would a solution like this satisfy the requirements necessary for the
use cases that drive your proposal?

-Ben