On 20 Apr 2010, at 13:17, Mick wrote:
...
"Introduced in Gecko 1.9.1: Code with UniversalXPConnect privileges
can monitor the list of available WiFi access points to obtain
information about them including their SSID, MAC address, and signal
strength. This capability was introduced primarily to allow WiFi-
based
location services to be used by geolocation services."
Hmm Mozilla's netlib. I had a look at the slides and bits of the
documentation on the Mozilla website, but I am still not really clear
what it does, or why it is needed.
I *believe* that the idea of having geolocation accessible to the
browser is so that websites should be able to provide locally-relevant
information.
The classic browser has no idea where you are, so if you open the
homepage of Starbucks / McDonalds / Burgerking / Tesco / Sainsburys /
whatever and click on "find my nearest store" then you'll need to
enter your zip code in order for the site to provide you that
information.
I *believe* that a geolocation-aware browser would be able to tell the
site where you are. So as soon as you open the webpage, the site will
query your browser, your browser will tell it where you are and an
AJAXy element on the page would say "Your nearest Tesco store is 13th
Street... Click here for directions".
I'm not really sure how this is supposed to work in practice. It's
clearly in its early days. This dougt.org guy (discovered by Googling)
seems to be involved with it on the Mozilla side and one of his blog
posts links to the W3C "Geolocation API Specification", which was only
finalised 6 months ago.
It says:
The Geolocation API defines a high-level interface to
location information associated only with the device hosting
the implementation, such as latitude and longitude. The API
itself is agnostic of the underlying location information
sources. Common sources of location information include
Global Positioning System (GPS) and location inferred from
network signals such as IP address, RFID, WiFi and Bluetooth
MAC addresses, and GSM/CDMA cell IDs, as well as user input.
No guarantee is given that the API returns the device's
actual location.
I can see that immediately that it's useful and practical if your GPS
talks to your browser and thus your location information is returned
to the website.
In theory one could determine one's location on the basis that the
locations of Fon_AP_1234, SkyHomebroadband_8797 and SmokyCoffeeShop
wifi APs, detected by a scan of your laptop's wifi card, are all
already known. However I am more sceptical about this in practice.
Note that browsers run on mobile phones, which often have GPS built in
these days, and that GPS chips are nowadays so cheap they could also
be build into laptops, were there the demand.
We could probably have a much longer discussion of how this could in
theory all work when it's fully developed, but in practice this USE
flag probably is of no use to any of us right now (unless, *perhaps*,
we're installing Gentoo on a mobile phone).
Stroller.
