[html5] Camera tag?

[Patrick Mueller]

Rik Sagar wrote:
> Not really what I was getting at!
> 
> I'm suggesting an element that allows the _capture_ of video or still images
> - from a camera (webcam) accessible from the browser.  The video or still
> image can then be transferred to a server.

This seems like a perfectly natural thing to ask, as we're starting to 
see the ubiquity of image/video capturing capabilities on the devices we 
use to browse the web.  And there are already some Flash apps which can 
do this, all within the browser.

It's complicated though.  We're talking about a capability of the 
browser to write data to the server, so there's a bunch of security to 
think about.  There's also figuring out how to let the user decide 
whether images/video should be uploaded at all.  I don't want to browse 
to some web site which surreptitiously starts uploading video content 
without me knowing about it.

So while it might end up being just a new element, it will likely have 
some non-trivial semantics and UA requirements around it.

-- 
Patrick Mueller - http://muellerware.org