IE8 support for the Location&Sensor API

Question

I've just tried installing WindowsNT's NMEA0183 driver. Although I haven't done much testing, it looks to be working fine with my GlobalSat BU-353  (Win7 x86 laptop).

Has Microsoft hinted when / if support for the Location & Sensor API will be added to Internet Explorer?

The W3C have a Geolocation API which was recently added to Firefox (I wrote an article about it at: http://www.geowebguru.com/articles/172-the-w3c-browser-geolocation-api ). The Firefox version gets the user's location from a Google web service and is based on IP address.

It would appear that the Location&Sensor API would be a natural source of data to implement this API in Internet Explorer...

Probably a long shot to get it working in time, but demonstrating this working with a GPS receiver vs. Firefox's IP-based system would look good at a Windows 7 party!


Richard

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Richard Marsden http://www.geowebguru.com http://www.mapping-tools.com

Answer 1

The problem with this approach is privacy. If a page is able to query the GPS data via JS, wouldn't the page know the exact location of a user ? 

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Michael

Answer 2

I believe it is a part of the specification, and it is definitely a part of the Firefox implementation.
Firefox defaults to giving a warning question asking if the user wants to share this information. The user may also switch the feature off completely, switch it on for particular site(s), or (I think) switch it on for all cases.



Richard

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Richard Marsden http://www.geowebguru.com http://www.mapping-tools.com

Answer 3

I still believe that privacy issues should be considered, because it is a) likely that the newbie user will say "yes" to the prompt and b) even if they read it, they might not understand what "location" means. In this case location means the a very precise one that exposes the house's location to the visitors - this is not what the user will understand if they are prompted by something like "Do you want this script to know your location ?".

To tell you my opinion, I find the entire Location API not useful. It is unlikely that an application wants to know the precise location of the PC unless if it is a GPS application in which case it can access the data via normal GPS sensor or even direct COM port.