[whatwg] HTML extension for system idle detection.

[Jeremy Orlow]

On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 3:53 PM, Mike Wilson <mikewse at hotmail.com> wrote:

>  David Bennett wrote:
>
>  On Mon, Aug 31, 2009 at 5:30 PM, Drew Wilson <atwilson at google.com> wrote:
>
>> This would be my inclination as well. I'm not entirely convinced that
>> "every web app should define their own idle timeout" is such desirable
>> behavior that we should build our API around it by forcing every caller to
>> specify their idle timeout - having a standard event that's fired with an
>> exposed state for apps that need it seems like a cleaner approach.
>>
>
> The trouble with this is it doesn't allow any experimentation on the part
> of the app/entity to figure out what is the best idle time for it's
> purposes.  In terms of chat it might be that a 3 minute or 5 minute idle
> time works best in terms of people's attention.  For something like watching
> a video perhaps a 15 minute idle would be a better length of time, or for an
> online game a longer idle time is probably useful before being signed out.
>  Different purposes have different requirements for the idle time so it
> makes sense to allow them to specify the different timeouts.
>
> This requirement could be solved in several other ways, f ex making sure
> that the "standard" timeout period is short enough to not be longer than
> what any app wants. Then (as was previously suggested) an app that wants a
> longer timeout can do setTimeout and trigger its own idle stuff if status
> has not come back to "active" during that time.
>

If we went the route of using events, I definitely think this is the way to
go.  Since the originally proposed API was based off of the timer API,
you're really only adding one step if you want that behavior.  Having a
globally configured value seems sloppy and you'll have to manually use
timeouts if, for example, you were using 2 libraries that used it for
different purposes and thus wanted different idle timeouts.


> Another alternative is to have no event, and just a property:
>     window.lastUserActionTime
> which is kept updated with the "msec since epoch" for the latest user input
> on the desktop. Then an app can implement its own idle functionality with
> totally own rules. This API has the drawback of maybe exposing too much
> information (the rate of input events to other apps), but may spawn some
> ideas.
>

Then you're poling, which seems pretty ugly.  I'd much prefer events to
this.

2009/8/31 Max Romantschuk <max at romantschuk.fi>
>
> One issue:
>

> Is the user idle when the tab is in the background, when the browser is in
> the background, or when the user is away from the machine? These are all
> distinct cases of different levels of "idleness", and it's largely depended
> on the use case which kind of "idleness" makes sense for a particular
> application.
>

I would argue that "when the browser is in the background" should be no
different from "when the tab is in the background".  Given that the
information the system uses to determine idleness (mouse movements and such)
are all available to a web app while it's in the foreground tab, it seems as
though knowing the idle time just from the perspective of your tab is not
terribly useful.  So, to me, I think it's pretty clear this should be system
wide idleness.
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