W3C Geolocation API Errata

Errata for Geolocation API Second Edition

This section is a place-holder for errata to be published on the W3C Geolocation API Second Edition dated of 8 November 2016.

Currently no errata have been reported.

Errata for Geolocation API First Edition

This section describes the known errata and proposed corrections for the W3C Geolocation API First Edition published as a Recommendation on 24 October 2013.

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 prose describe that timeout and maximumAge in PositionOptions can take infinite values, but Infinite gets converted to 0 for values of type long;
3. 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. using the [Clamp] extended attribute gets Infinite properly converted to the maximum value of the integer type;

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

   dictionary PositionOptions {
       boolean enableHighAccuracy = false;
       [Clamp] unsigned long timeout = 0xFFFFFFFF;
       [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.

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