Ubiquitous Web →Geolocation Working Group →

W3C Geolocation API Errata

WebIDL improvements

Given the evolution of WebIDL, the following changes would better match

1. the NavigatorGeolocation interface would be better expressed as a partial interface;
2. the interface PositionOptions would be better written as a dictionary with default values matching the prose description of 5.2; the said prose can then be reduced

Proposed correction:

1. the interface NavigatorGeolocation should be rewritten as:

   partial interface Navigator {
     readonly attribute Geolocation geolocation;
   };

2. The WebIDL declaration of PositionOptions should be changed to:

   dictionary PositionOptions {
       boolean enableHighAccuracy = false;
       [Clamp] unsigned long timeout;
       [Clamp] unsigned long maximumAge = 0;
     };
   

   In 5.1, the pre-processing steps of getCurrentPosition and “watch process” are removed. In 5.2, the text describing the default values of enableHighAccuracy, timeout and maximumAge (paragraphs 5, 7 and 10 in that section) are removed.

Infinite values in algorithms

1. The algorithm for the timeout and maxAge options in getCurrentPosition and watchPosition allude to infinite values, which are not compatible with the long type

Proposed correction:

1. • Replace step 5 in getCurrentPosition as follows: “If timeout is present, start a timer that will fire after the number of milliseconds denoted by the value of the timeout variable. When the timer fires, cancel any ongoing ___location acquisition operations associated with this instance of the steps, invoke the errorCallback (if present) with a new PositionError object whose code attribute is set to TIMEOUT, and exit this set of steps.”
   • Delete “Setting the maximumAge to Infinity must determine the implementation to return a cached position regardless of its age.”
   • Apply similar fixes to other mentions of Infinity in the spec

Conformance requirements

1. The sentence starting with “Objects implementing the Navigator interface” is redundant with WebIDL and can be removed;
2. the getCurrentPosition and “watch process” algorithms are indicated as “should execute the following set of steps”; the steps in the algoritms are in fact mandatory.

Proposed corrections:

1. Remove second paragraph of section 5.1
2. Replace “should execute” with “must execute” in the getCurrentPosition and “watch process” algorithms

References

1. The list editors for the [BROWSINGCONTEXT] and [NAVIGATOR] references (linked to HTML5) is incorrect;
2. The full stop after the title of the URI spec should be moved before the space;
3. Instead of The DOMTimeStamp Type, a more useful reference is the one defined in WebIDL
4. RFC3066 is listed in the references, but not used in the specification, and should be removed