#921: Navigation Activation Info

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Opened Dec 13, 2023

こんにちは TAG-さん!

I'm requesting a TAG review of Navigation Activation Info.

This is a small addition to the navigation API, that exposes information about the last cross-document navigation.

Further details:

  • I have reviewed the TAG's Web Platform Design Principles
  • Relevant time constraints or deadlines: [please provide]
  • The group where the work on this specification is currently being done: WHATWG
  • The group where standardization of this work is intended to be done (if current group is a community group or other incubation venue): WHATWG
  • Major unresolved issues with or opposition to this specification: None at the moment.
  • This work is being funded by: Google

You should also know that this is implemented in Chromium behind a flag.

[please tell us anything you think is relevant to this review]

We'd prefer the TAG provide feedback as (please delete all but the desired option):

🐛 open issues in our GitHub repo for each point of feedback

☂️ open a single issue in our GitHub repo for the entire review

💬 leave review feedback as a comment in this issue and @-notify [github usernames]


CAREFULLY READ AND DELETE CONTENT BELOW THIS LINE BEFORE SUBMITTING

Please preview the issue and check that the links work before submitting.

In particular, if anything links to a URL which requires authentication (e.g. Google document), please make sure anyone with the link can access the document. We would prefer fully public documents though, since we work in the open.

¹ We require an explainer to give the relevant context for the spec review, even if the spec has some background information. For background, see our explanation of how to write a good explainer. We recommend the explainer to be in Markdown.

² A Security and Privacy questionnaire helps us understand potential security and privacy issues and mitigations for your design, and can save us asking redundant questions. See https://www.w3.org/TR/security-privacy-questionnaire/.

Discussions

2024-01-08

Minutes

Dan: One thing that comes to mind - the term Activiation is overloaded...

Yves: change is only to add a link ... cross document... Might have some privacy implications... Unless it's accessible already using the history API...

Matthew: the explainer is a little minimal... I think both those points are good... It would be good to know if this exposes more information than what's before...

Matthew: in the HTML spec most of the instances of activation are about user activation... https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/nav-history-apis.html#navigation-activation-interface

Matthew: on MDN - there's a user activation of an interface .. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/userActivation

<blockquote>

Hi @noamr - thanks for sending this our way.

A couple of initial questions we had:

  1. regarding the naming of the API - it seems like the term "Activation" is a bit overloaded - in particular it's used in the context of user activation which is a completely separate concept. We're concered this could cause developer confusion. Have you consdered any alternatives?

  2. what's the current state of this with regard to the HTML spec itself?

  3. the security & privacy responses say that "It exposes information about the most recent cross-document navigation." It's not clear if this means it's exposing additional information that the developer wouldn't have had access to before or if it's infomation that the developer would have had access to anyway? In general there is a lack of information in the explainer about potential abuse cases. It's concerning that this is exposing information about navigation across documents as this could be a potential privacy issue... so I think some additional discussion of this is warranted in the explainer.

  4. do you have any information about multi-implementer support?

</blockquote>

Dan: leaves comment