Intent to Implement: Screen Orientation API

[Christophe Dumez]

Contact emails

ch.d...@samsung.com, sl.ost...@samsung.com, mlam...@chromium.org

Spec

https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/screen-orientation/raw-file/tip/Overview.html

Summary
The Screen Orientation API's goal is to provide an interface for web applications to be able to read the screen orientation state, to be informed when this state changes and to be able to lock the screen orientation to a specific state.

Motivation

We are particularly interesting in the screen orientation locking capabilities on the API and its applications for mobile gaming.

Compatibility Risk

Low:

- The API is already supported by Firefox (Desktop and Android):

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Screen.orientation
- Support was also recently added to Internet Explorer 11:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/dn433241(v=vs.85).aspx

The spec is mostly stable but we are expecting a few changes as Mounir Lamouri (editor) is working on it. We plan on advancing the implementation together with the specification.

Ongoing technical constraints

None, but requires hardware support.

Will this feature be supported on all five Blink platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS and Android)?

No. This feature is mobile oriented and we plan to support for Android only short-term, with layout testing support on desktop.

OWP launch tracking bug?

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=162827

Link to entry on the feature dashboard

Not yet. Will add a row as soon as I get edit access.

Requesting approval to ship?

No.

Kind regards,

-- 
Christophe Dumez - Samsung Telecommunications America

[Mounir Lamouri]

On Sat, 8 Feb 2014, at 3:37, Christophe Dumez wrote:
> *Will this feature be supported on all five Blink platforms (Windows,
> Mac, Linux, Chrome OS and Android)?*
>
> **

>
> No. This feature is mobile oriented and we plan to support for Android
> only short-term, with layout testing support on desktop.

I do not see why this feature should not work for other platforms than
Android. On desktop, we could always fail to lock (supported by the
spec), thus unlock-ing would be a no-op. Regarding the orientation, it
would be as simple as comparing the width and the height of the screen,
like CSS usually define screen orientation. This is definitely how
Gecko/Firefox behave. Do you know what IE11 is doing on desktop?

--
Mounir

[PhistucK]

Regarding Internet Explorer 11 -

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/dn433241(v=vs.85).aspx

The entire API is only supported in Windows 8.1 (where I assume some Windows screen orientation API was introduced) and locking only works in full screen mode.

☆PhistucK

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[Christophe Dumez]

Yes, we can and should definitely "fallback" nicely on desktop, this is
not what I meant.
I do not know how IE11 behaves on desktop, the feature is not
implemented on Windows 7 so I cannot test myself.

Kr,

[Eugene Girard]

There seems to be a related api in core/frame/Window.idl - is that related?

[PhistucK]

This was the nonstandard incarnation of the API, I believe.

☆PhistucK

[Kenneth Rohde Christiansen]

LGTM as this is already part of the roadmap for this year and I have
been discussing this extensively with John Mellor and Peter Beverloo.

I know that a few changes are planned for the spec, like returning a
Promise instead of a boolean, so we need to tackle these as they
happen. I hope things goes smoothly and that we can ship this feature
soon as it is requested by many web game developers.

Cheers
Kenneth

> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
> email to blink-dev+...@chromium.org.

--
Kenneth Rohde Christiansen
Web Platform Architect, Intel Corporation.
Phone +45 4294 9458 ﹆﹆﹆

[Peter Beverloo]

Getting support for Screen Orientation Lock is great, thanks for doing this!  Since we support features such as Device Orientation on non-Android platforms as well, and having consistent feature support is a good thing, it'd be great if you (Mounir?) could have a look at the feasibility of extending this to other platforms as well.

Chris' patch is implementing this behind a flag, so it will be safe to make changes as the specification is being finished up.

https://codereview.chromium.org/132113006/

Thanks,

Peter

[Eric Seidel]

Curious if there is any status update on this feature?

[Mounir Lamouri]

On Fri, 9 May 2014, at 16:05, Eric Seidel wrote:
> Curious if there is any status update on this feature?

There is some version of the API behind the experimental flag in
trunk/dev. I'm not sure what's the status in Beta. That version should
be very close to what Microsoft and Mozilla have as a prefixed API. In
the mean time we changed the specification. Those changes have not yet
been entirely reflected in our implementation. There is also some work
happening to make the orientation reading part working on all platforms
and the locking graciously failing on other platforms than Android. We
are targeting shipping for M37.

-- Mounir

[Rick Byers]

We should plan to make this API work with full fidelity on ChromeOS when we have the hardware (eg. the new Lenovo convertible device auto-rotates, and so should support rotation lock APIs).  +flackr who owns this code.  If this API is plumbed up to the content API in an appropriate platform neutral way, I'm sure we can get it implemented fully on ChromeOS.

Rick

[phili...@gmail.com]

Looking forward to this. Great addition for mobile web games!

[lonc...@gmail.com]

Oh, this feature is long overdue and will be greatly appreciated by us physical interface types!

Looking forward.