[whatwg] Proposal for a debugging information API

[Ian Hickson]

On Wed, 14 Nov 2012, David Barrett-Kahn wrote:
> 
> My proposal is to have a class of information which can be made 
> available to an app only after the display of a generic 'this 
> application has crashed' dialog, which could be drilled into to show 
> what is being disclosed, and which of course can be denied.
> 
> Good examples of the information in question are the system's precise 
> hardware and network configuration, what Chrome extensions it has 
> installed, and perhaps a screenshot of the failed application.

There's basically no way we could ever do this without a lot of user 
opt-in, because of the privacy concerns (a hostile site could embed a 
user's facebook page, trigger a crash to get a screenshot, and then 
scrape the screenshot and compare it to the hardware information to work 
out what device they were using, who they were, etc).

Just having a dialog as you propose here:

> https://docs.google.com/document/pub?id=1pw2Bzvy6OEn8YY3fAcZiReJPmgB79swkx-NJAdcemPk

...would probably not be enough; users can easily be tricked into clicking 
that kind of dialog (e.g. by using misleading domain names, or by having 
them play a game that involves hitting "enter" a lot).

Clearly though this kind of thing would be hugely helpful for debugging. 
My recommendation would be to approach browser vendors directly with the 
proposal and experiment with different ideas to find one that balances 
user concerns with practical results, somewhat as discussed here:

   http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/FAQ#Is_there_a_process_for_adding_new_features_to_a_specification.3F

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'