[whatwg] HTML extension for system idle detection.

[Ian Hickson]

On Fri, 28 Aug 2009, David Bennett wrote:
> 
> Any instant messaging client, or any client that requires user presence, 
> will use this to keep track of the users idle state.  Currently the idle 
> state of a user inside a browser tell tend to be incorrect, and this 
> leads to problems with people being unable to rely on the available 
> status of a user.  Without this information it is difficult to do a full 
> featured and reliable instant messaging client inside the browser since 
> this makes the users' status somewhat unreliable.
> 
> Lots of social networking sites and other sites centered around user 
> interactions on the net keep track of the users idle state for enabling 
> interactions with people that are currently online, this would be 
> especially useful for interactive online gaming.
> 
> A process that would like to do some heavy duty processing, like 
> seti at home, could use the system idle detection to enable the processing 
> only when the user is idle and enable it to not interfere with or 
> degrade their normal browsing experience.

These seems reasonable. I think they would be best handled as an 
independent specification, since they don't depends on HTML itself. I 
would recommend bringing this up in the public-webapps working group, with 
some proposed spec text and a sample implementations.

-- 
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