Intent to Ship: HIDDevice forget()
François Beaufort 🇫🇷
Contact emails
Explainer
https://github.com/WICG/webhid/blob/main/EXPLAINER.md
Specification
https://wicg.github.io/webhid/#forget-method
https://github.com/WICG/webhid/pull/84
Summary
The HIDDevice forget() method allows web developers to voluntarily revoke a permission to a HIDDevice that was granted by a user.
Blink component
Motivation
Some sites may not be interested in retaining long-term permissions to access a HID device. For example, for an educational web application used on a shared computer with many devices, a large number of accumulated user-generated permissions creates a poor user experience.
In addition to user agent mitigations to avoid this problem, such as defaulting to a session scoped permission on the first request or expiring infrequently used permissions, it should be possible for the site itself to clean up user-generated permissions it is no longer interested in retaining.
// Request a HID device.
const [device] = await navigator.hid.requestDevice({ filters: [] });
// Then later... revoke permission to the HID device.
await device.forget();
We expect similar functionality to Web Bluetooth, WebUSB, and the Serial API to be added.
TAG review
https://github.com/w3ctag/design-reviews/issues/703
TAG review status
Pending
Risks
Interoperability and Compatibility
This small addition to the HIDDevice object does not change the overall status of WebHID interoperability or compatibility.
Signals from other implementations (Gecko, WebKit):
Gecko: No Signal [1]
WebKit: No Signal [1]
Web / Framework developers: Positive https://github.com/WICG/webhid/issues/39
Other signals: Google Meet folks have tried it and strongly support this addition.
[1] Both Gecko and WebKit are unlikely to object to this feature specifically, but object to the overall WebHID API as a whole, hence it doesn't make sense to bug them with specific questions on this.
Activation:
This feature can't be polyfilled. It should be fairly trivial for developers to adopt this new feature.
Debuggability
No specific DevTools changes are required. This feature is treated like any other JS method.
Note that exposing DevTools debugging support for device-access APIs (WebHID included) is discussed at https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1142566.
Is this feature fully tested by web-platform-tests?
No, because permission storage is implemented outside of Blink and so isn’t testable by web-platform-tests. Some tests that only verify the presence of interfaces and attributes will be available at https://wpt.fyi/results/webhid though.
Requires code in //chrome?
Yes, permission storage is implemented in //chrome.
Tracking bug
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1279822
Estimated milestones
100
Link to entry on the Chrome Platform Status
https://chromestatus.com/feature/5723581527883776
Links to previous Intent discussions
Intent to prototype: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/c2vCYr-0dqk/m/3nSeViRLCgAJ
Yoav Weiss
Daniel Bratell
LGTM2
About web tests, is there no method that behaves differently in an observable way when the permission isn't given?
/Daniel
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Mike West
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Matt Reynolds
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