[whatwg] <video>, <object>, Timed Media Elements

[ddailey]

As a newcomer to this group, please forgive my ignorance of discussions 
that, undoubtedly, have already taken place, but as I have been reading 
these threads on <video> and timed media and <object>, a couple of questions 
have come to mind:

1. why not just include SMIL as a part of HTML, much in the same way that it 
is integrated with SVG? It is an existing W3C reco.

2. For content such as XML, MathML, SVG, ChemML... that one would like to 
embed in an HTML document could there not be some sort of tag (<object> was 
supposed to work, but doesn't in some browsers) like say

        <dom data="some.xml" id="D">

for which the DOM associated with the XML content would be easily accessible 
through script as with:

        XMLDoc=document.getElementById("D").getXMLDocument.

It seems as though external things which have DOMs are quite different that 
other sorts of media and may deserve their own tag.

David Dailey

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Maciej Stachowiak" <mjs at apple.com>
To: <whatwg at whatwg.org>
Sent: Wednesday, March 21, 2007 8:08 PM
Subject: [whatwg] Apple Proposal for Timed Media Elements


> Hello WHAT Working Group,
>
> With the recent discussions about the <video> element, we've decided  to 
> post our own proposal in this area. This proposal is a joint  effort from 
> the Safari/WebKit team and some of Apple's top timed  media experts, who 
> have experience with QuickTime and other media  technologies.
>
> A number of Apple Engineers will follow and participate in further 
> <video> discussions, including myself and my colleague Dave Singer,  who 
> has represented Apple in a number of media-related standards groups.
>
> We started work on these documents before the <video> element was  added 
> to the spec and indeed before Opera made their original  proposal. But in 
> the interests of getting them out quickly, we  decided to publish what we 
> have, rather than revising the documents  to be relative to the current 
> spec. This document is still a work in  progress, and I hope together we 
> can refine it and fold it into the  Web Apps 1.0 spec.
>
> There are a few areas of difference worth highlighting:
>
> - Our proposal includes a CSS module, which we will eventually submit  to 
> the CSS Working Group. We believe that many aspects of controlling  timed 
> media are presentational, and so are best represented in CSS.  Although 
> Web Apps 1.0 is not the final destination for this document,  we think it 
> makes more sense to consider the whole design at once.
>
> - We have included a more thorough set of events and properties which  we 
> think are needed to build good custom controller UI. In general,  we would 
> like to enable not just current web use cases but also  somewhat more 
> advanced uses.
>
> - We have included an <audio> element as well as <video>.
>
> - We have included a mechanism for static fallback based on container 
> type and codec, so that it's possible to choose the best video format  for 
> a client even if user agent codec support varies.
>
> We will be starting separate threads on these and other key issues.  We've 
> posted our current proposals here:
>
> CSS Timed Media Module proposal - http://webkit.org/specs/ 
> Timed_Media_CSS.html
> HTML Timed Media Elements - http://webkit.org/specs/ 
> HTML_Timed_Media_Elements.html
>
> We also have a list of areas where we think the proposal could use 
> refinement or additional features, but where we do not yet have a  final 
> design to present:
>
> http://webkit.org/specs/Timed_Media_Elements-Open_Issues.html
>
> Regards,
> Maciej Stachowiak
>
>