Further investigation on local network and discovery #7
Description
As pointed out in #1, device names in local network is not globally unique and it is difficult to determine how to trust such a device. Such a device often has its default name, it can be assigned automatically, or users can determine its name as they want.
On the other hand, we could face several difficulties when we would use such a local network device. For example:
- We must manually indicate device name as a form of a URL that begins with
http://orhttps://. - Current modern browser do not provide capability of service discovery to find local servers automatically. Note that the old versions of Safari for Mac used to have such a feature.
- Web applications do not have any methods to discover local servers due to security and privacy consideration. (see W3C Working Group Note of Network Service Discovery for more information.)
In this issue, we would like to explore how we should deal with device names and DNS-SD/mDNS for local device utilization and enhancement without enlarging risks and threats, so that users would gain benefits of local device integration into web applications.