[whatwg] Forcing orientation in content

[Glenn Maynard]

On Tue, Sep 10, 2013 at 4:22 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:

>  > In practice, game developers are rarely willing to spend the time to
> > make their games work well in both portrait and landscape.
>
> That's certainly true, but the reality is that on the Web a web browser
> window might be any number of dimensions, so that's a problem you have to
> deal with regardless.
>

(I'm a little confused by this, since my next sentence was explaining how
games can deal with this even if they don't spend the time to make it work
well.)

>
> > In Firefox we have implemented the screen orientation spec
> > https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/screen-orientation/raw-file/tip/Overview.html
>
> That is unfortuate. I don't think that API puts the user first.
>

This is window.resizeTo all over again, and pages would use it for the same
reason: "our page looks best in 640x480" becomes "our page looks best in
portrait".  The results will be far worse: the user's device will be
flipping back and forth between orientations as he browses from page to
page.  Even if the user is simply tapping browser back a few times, the
button will move around between each press as each page in history picks
its preferred orientation.

Unless implementations deal with these issues somehow, this API looks
catastrophically broken.  It seems like somebody just took a native mobile
orientation API and translated it to JavaScript, without thinking about the
differences between task switching on mobile and navigating between web
pages.

-- 
Glenn Maynard