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WICG / close-watcher

A web API proposal for watching for close requests (e.g. Esc, Android back button, ...)
https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/interaction.html#close-requests-and-close-watchers
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Should the Esc key count as user activation? #7

Closed domenic closed 2 years ago

domenic commented 2 years ago

When coding up the current spec/explainer draft, I realized that the Esc key counts as user activation. This means that on desktop, all the fancy abuse prevention mechanisms for the cancel event do nothing: since pressing Esc means there is always recent user activation, the cancel event will always fire (and can be preventDefault()ed).

On the one hand: that seems fine! On desktop we don't have to worry about back trapping, and we can already preventDefault() the Esc keydown event. No issues; this makes the API easier to use on desktop as you don't have to worry so much about user activation!

On the other hand: this is a weird divergence between desktop and Android (or desktop and other platforms where the close signal is not a user activation), and makes code harder to test. So maybe we should spec it so that an Esc keypress (or other user action) that sends a close signal, never counts as user activation, regardless of the platform.

domenic commented 2 years ago

@chrishtr suggests that maybe the Esc key in general should not count as user activation, which would indeed solve this problem. For example, visiting a page, and doing nothing but pressing Esc, should maybe not give that page license to show a popup, or play unmuted video.

This is pretty interesting and probably deserves wider discussion with the HTML community. I will add a comment at https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/3849.

mustaqahmed commented 2 years ago

I agree with @domenic's proposal here, and this should be discussed in whatwg/html#3849.

(Reposting from that HTML issue: Chrome stopped counting Esc key as a user activation a while ago.)

domenic commented 2 years ago

This seems to be being taken care of on the HTML side, so we are good to go: https://github.com/whatwg/html/pull/7248. Thanks @mustaqahmed for doing that work!