Meeting with Mozilla

[Justin]

Yesterday Doug and Nino from Mozilla dropped by the ATRC, and a few of  
us had a chance to sit in and talk with them.

The conversation centered around Geolocation with a focus on WIPS and  
how it could be supported by Firefox.

Support for Geolocation:
Firefox 3.5
Safari (should be in next version)
IE 8 (likely in the next point release)
Opera (has a plugin from skyhook to support this)

V2
V2 (the second version of the spec) will begin to include Human  
Readable information, and take into account addressing.
The current version, V1, returns information such as longitude,  
latitude, altitude, and accuracy.
  For addressing there are 30+ possible fields, which they are looking  
to pare down closer to 9.
A draft version should be available within the next 6 months
no date for when it will be implemented,
will be in a 3.5x release of Firefox

How it works (see diagram attachment):
The user agent (browser) acts as a middle man between the web and the  
positioning  service
The web will make a call for the position
The user agent will request positioning information from a positioning  
service
The user agent will return the information as a W3C object that is  
sent back to the DOM
Currently there are only two supported location services
GLS (Google Location Service)
http://google-code-updates.blogspot.com/2009/04/google-location-services-now-in-mozilla.html
User specified
Currently only one location server allowed, you can hack it to change  
the pointer from GLS to some other service
3.51 should include support for multiple providers
This will allow the WIPS location to be running at the same time (see  
Diagram)



Fennec
Currently supports Maemo, a linux based OS
Plans to support Windows Mobile and Symbian
Apple's development restrictions prevent any standalone or embedded  
version of Firefox on the iPhone OS.
No plans for an Android version

It was mentioned that webkit is standards compliant, so anything that  
makes it into the spec should also be available there.

It appears that the goal would be to make WIPS easily integratabtle  
with Firefox, and to have, as part of the V2 spec, the necessary  
information for indoor positioning part of the W3C object that is  
returned to the DOM.

Privacy is a key concern that we will have to be focused on. How we  
store, use, and manage the position information is important. Also,  
we'll have to take into consideration how a user will consent to this.  
For example, this could be part of the agreement upon installation, a  
setting they have to turn on, or something else.

That was the quick run down of my notes, please feel free to ask any  
questions. For those who were also part of the meeting, please feel  
free to submit your notes as well and mention any errors and/or  
omissions that I have made.

Thanks
Justin

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