Subject: [httpwg/http-extensions] Geolocation Header (#364)

From: HTTP issue updates <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2017 13:13:10 +0000 (UTC)

Hello,

My name is Luis. I'd like to discuss with you a proposal to solve the following use case:

Currently, the only mechanism to share your location with a website is through the JS Geolocation API. This has some limitations: First, in order to have the server know the client’s location there are two full roundtrips required (one roundtrip to load the page with Javascript code, and a second roundtrip to actually send the location to the server and get back a location-aware response). While not as significant as the first limitation, the second limitation is that the client must execute Javascript in order to acquire location.

For example, for services like Search, it means that the very first response from a server will contain non-localized results, and a second roundtrip would be required to refresh those results (assuming Geolocation permission is already granted for the origin).

There's many ways to solve this problem through headers, so no JS would be required and clients could proactively include geolocation data in the very first request (after the server asked for it in previous sessions, and permissions are granted).

[Here you can find a document detailing the problem and a possible proposal](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zL4qyOpp6W36H4_eMpmth3Yj_ZTMZ3wCupc01q5qatA/edit)

After discussing with @igrigorik he suggested that Client Hints might be a potential way to implement this too, which makes perfect sense. However, some features in the original proposal would not be possible with current CH draft (parameters for CH-Accept or path restrictions for when the data should be included).

It would be great to get your opinion on this and whether this is something that might be interesting for people in this working group.

Thanks!
Luis.

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