[whatwg] Apple Proposal for Timed Media Elements

[Maciej Stachowiak]

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