HTML5 and Geolocation revisited
As we saw in our earlier post on HTML5 and Geolocation, the concept has a lot of potential for pushing or retrieving relevant information depending on your location and time. This looks great for getting restaurant recommendations in your car at lunch time on Facebook or finding where your partners are during a project through your project management tool.
Mark Pilgrim has an excellent post on geolocation at Diveintohtml5. You can find out how to implement it for browsers which support it. He also explains workarounds to support the various APIs from device vendors and for the usual suspect, Internet Explorer.
IE9 has no mention about geolocation in their features while all the competing browsers are ramping up support. Another reason for IE to loose browser market share it seems.
User Privacy Concerns
The way the specification is structured, user opt in is a necessary requirement for it to be enabled. No application can force a user to accept giving away their location. This is an important privacy issue. Hope it holds on well and there are no breaches. Being paranoid about this feature won’t be of much help as there are other means being used to track us anyways.
You can look at the entire spec at http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html
The Future for both looks good
Google and Apple continue their push for HTML5. With popular smaller players like Aviary, Scribd and others adding support and more coming along the future of HTML5 looks very good indeed. Now with more devices and browsers supporting geolocation along with adoption by the main players, this too will lead to some interesting innovations in how we use the internet.