On 12/11/12 16:36, jim.math...@gmail.com wrote:
I don’t see how this information will be of any use in deciding how
to present content, and will likely be used in the wrong way which
will break user experiences.
We have a related situation with W3C touch event interfaces. Web
authors are using their presence as a way to detect mobile devices
with the assumption that these devices don’t support mouse input. See
bug 806805 for feel for what breaks when we add support (rightfully)
for touch input events in the desktop product. I think it’s possible
“Tablet” or “Touch” in the UA could be abused in the same way.
I guess the counter-argument could be that bogus assumptions are an
orthogonal problem; unless we remove all possible ways of detecting
touch input (impossible!), then anyone _could_ make this mistake. We
just need to tell framework authors that it is a mistake. And that's
independent of how they are doing the detection.
The real problem here seems to be a lack of a good way to detect
device capabilities, which can change in real-time while the browser
is running. For example, I have a Samsung Series 7 that has touch, a
dock, a mouse, and a keyboard. Docking the device makes it a desktop,
undocking it makes it a tablet. I’d like web sites to react
appropriately to these changes – IMHO this is something that should
be solved via information exposed to content through js or css, and
through better documentation / examples on MDN.
That is our mantra :-) Although I'm sure our documentation could be
improved.
Gerv
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