742117 - Warn the user if a demo requires a feature that is not supported on their platform (Touch Events, Orientation, etc.)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(developer.mozilla.org Graveyard :: Demo Studio / Dev Derby, enhancement)

Description

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

A user brought this up in bug 737296.

> The first demo "Pinball" does nothing.
> The second demo "Help UFO" does nothing unless you guess and try the W-A-S-D keys.
> ...
> All demos need to do feature detection and warn if required or important 
> features like device motion and orientation aren't detected. Mozilla 
> evangelists like Chris Heilmann harp on this, but demos rarely walk the walk.

Possible solution:

Provide a set of checkboxes for things like "This demo requires a recent mobile browser" and similar. Any other ideas?

Comment 1

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

Luke also mentioned feature detection.

> We could add feature-detection for the tagged technologies
> to the launch bar and display a notice in the bar for
> unsupported features.

Comment 2

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

Another good idea from Luke:

> automatically detect user agent and unsupported features.
> Syndicate the notice to the demo author.

Comment 3

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

Comment 2 is covered in bug 746817. For this feature, see the specification below.

What problems would this solve?
===============================
Some Demo Studio demos use technologies that only work on certain platforms. For example, as I note above, "Help UFO" only works on mobile browsers. When loaded on the desktop, it cannot be used and appears to do nothing.

Who would use this?
===================
Users browsing demos would be most affected by this new feature.

What would users see?
=====================
Users would see a notice if a particular demo does not work on their platform. For example, if a user loaded "Help UFO" on the desktop they would see a notice about the demo only working properly on mobile browsers. If a user loads the same demo in a mobile browser, they should not see the notice.

What would users do? What would happen as a result?
===================================================
Users would read this notice and, ideally, would not be confused if a demo does not appear to work on their platform.

Is there anything else we should know?
======================================
A few different possible solutions to this problem -- feature detection, asking the author what platforms the demo supports, etc.

Comment 4

[Les Orchard [:lorchard]]

Same question as bug 746817: "technology detection" sounds like a pretty big dev challenge. Do you have any pointers to prior art, or some place else that already does something like this?

Comment 5

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

Same response. :-)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=746817#c3

Comment 6

[Luke Crouch [:groovecoder]]

Do something with http://www.browserscope.org/ ?

Comment 7

[Les Orchard [:lorchard]]

(In reply to Luke Crouch [:groovecoder] from comment #6)
> Do something with http://www.browserscope.org/ ?

Sure... building a DB of platforms vs features are what the compatibility tables on MDN are about. We could make those more machine readable. Or pull them from a source like browserscope. That's more a clerical challenge in keeping the data up to date than a technical one.

What I'm saying is that scanning a demo to detect what technologies it uses is a challenge, and why we have tech tags. browserscope doesn't do that for us

Comment 8

[John Karahalis [:openjck]]

I think author-selected tech tags work fine as a way of determining what features are used. The design purist in me would still love feature detection, but it's obviously way out of scope.

Comment 9

[ali spivak]

Demo Studio is being retired from MDN and archived as of end January 2016