[whatwg] Geolocation - Browser usability issues with regards to asking user permission

[Rich Tibbett]

Biju wrote:
> What I want from browser vendors is make
> navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition
> and navigator.geolocation.watchPosition ONLY callable from a CLICK event.
> I thought we all learned lesson from window.open popups

window.open is still entirely underspecified in standards when it comes 
to its behavior in trusted vs. non-trusted click event invocation. The 
first thing somebody would need to is document how window.open works 
according to different modes of invocation. Then at least we would have 
a model to be able to discuss for other similar scenarios.

What you're then suggesting is that we allow *trusted* click events 
(according to the DOM Level 3 Events definition) to trigger a 
non-blocking dialog to enable geolocation in the same way as window.open 
only opens a popup window if it has been called from a trusted 
user-initiated click event. That seems logical to me and it's something 
that we attempted to define in a blue-sky proposal elsewhere: 
http://dev.w3.org/2009/dap/contacts/Overview.html#api-invocation-via-dom-events. 
The same model could potentially be applied to geolocation and other 
upcoming Web APIs.

The ability for a user to click something and receive a response that 
fits their work flow, instead of an async bar that the OP suggested 
users are frequently missing seems like something we should look in to 
more. Some interaction that's a little bit like the file picker 
interaction, but with a non-modal output notification.

- Rich