[whatwg] Forcing orientation in content

[Glenn Maynard]

On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 2:45 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:

> 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?
>

In mobile accelerometer/gyro-based games, you don't want the user's
shifting the device around to cause the screen to change orientation while
they're playing.  This means locking the current orientation, though,
rather than a specific orientation (for example, you'd probably want to
unlock it when the user is in a menu and not actually playing the game).

On Fri, Jul 12, 2013 at 7:07 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:

> Sure, some orientations might be better -- just like the HTML spec is more
> readable on a taller large screen than on a landscape phone screen -- but
> if the user wants to play the other way, it seems wrong to be able to
> prevent it.
>

In practice, game developers are rarely willing to spend the time to make
their games work well in both portrait and landscape.  The Web solution is
probably not to lock the display, though, but to letterbox the display if
the window's aspect ratio is too far off, as with videos.

-- 
Glenn Maynard