Resolve overlap with Network Error Logging API

anniesullie / web-page-abandonment-api

Proposal for new API which makes it easier for developers to know when page loads were abandoned.

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Resolve overlap with Network Error Logging API #1

Open anniesullie opened 4 years ago

anniesullie commented 4 years ago

If we use a reporting API to report abandonment, there will be an overlap with the abandoned error in the Network Error Logging API. That API is similar to this one, but subtly different:

It reports abandonment for all network requests, not just page loads.
It only reports abandonment for the request, not the page load. For example, if the initial HTML of the page loads fully, but the user abandons the page before content displays, it's not abandonment from the NEL perspective but it is from this API's perspective.

igneel64 commented 4 years ago

One case that came to my mind and might point out the kind of overlap/combination with NEL is if we want to include in the new metric cases like:

The user initates a navigation to a site.
The user faces in the main document request, a network error which is in the range of Server errors(500-599) or after Redirects (300-399).
The user closes the current tab/window.

Because I see that this is indeed a case that we could use NEL data, would we consider this case an occurance of abandonment?

anniesullie commented 4 years ago

My opinion in the case of errors is that the page is not really abandoned--the user received some kind of error message, which is kind of equivalent to an FCP on a well-behaved page. Would love to hear more opinions on this.

neilstuartcraig commented 4 years ago

I just had a read of this and it's great, I think it'd be really valuable. My personal opinion is that NEL should not include abandoned as it's not a network error, it's a user action (assuming i am not missing something).

What I'd suggest as a possible addition to your proposal @anniesullie is that abandoned is actually removed from NEL and replaced by this. Then also that there's a phase or type added to the abandonment report which would be e.g. during-request or during-download etc. - that would be a really useful discriminator to use in reports.

I also would strongly favour using the reporting API rather than Chrome User Experience reporting as it's (at least potentially) cross-browser and we can more easily merge the data with our existing NEL, CSP, Expect CT etc. reporting.

igneel64 commented 4 years ago

@neilstuartcraig a discussion about the "where" could this be exposed, can also be found here https://github.com/anniesullie/web-page-abandonment-api/issues/3#issuecomment-587951678