[whatwg] Forcing orientation in content

[Peter Occil]

One use case I can think of is games.  For instance, there are several games 
for Android that run the game in a particular orientation, such as Jewels 
Deluxe, Shoot the Apple, and similar puzzle and casual games.

I can't speak for why that's the case exactly, but I believe it's for at 
least one of the following:

- Some puzzle games have a non-square gameboard, such as many jewel/gem 
matching games.  Using two different orientations might force the gameboard 
to look smaller in one orientation than the other.
- In some games, resizing the viewport to either orientation causes two 
issues:  The game might look squashed in one orientation but not the other, 
or the game will be letterboxed in one orientation if aspect ratio is 
preserved.
- It might be more costly to create game assets and user experience for both 
orientations.

I agree that for Web sites in general, other than games, these points are 
not important. (The use case of games is hinted at by David Bruant's opening 
message.)  These points also wouldn't matter much if the game can listen for 
orientation changes (such as the "onorientationchange" event) and redraw the 
game rotated as needed to give the illusion that the game is "locked" at a 
particular orientation, but I don't know how easy that would be compared to 
the alternative of forcing a particular orientation.

-----Original Message----- 
From: Ian Hickson
Sent: Friday, July 12, 2013 3:45 PM
To: David Bruant
Cc: whatwg
Subject: Re: [whatwg] Forcing orientation in content

On Thu, 18 Apr 2013, David Bruant wrote:
>
> Currently working on a web project where tablet support (iPad
> especially) is important, I'm facing a need which apparently the
> platform doesn't support. I would need to lock the screen in landscape
> mode.

Why? As a user on desktop, I can resize my window however I want, to be
landscape or portrait. Why wouldn't I be allowed to do the same on any
other device?

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