[whatwg] Re: media types

[Mark Schenk]

On Mon, 26 Jul 2004 12:43:08 +0100, Malcolm Rowe  
<malcolm-what at farside.org.uk> wrote:

>> Therefor I would like to suggest a read-only "window.medium" set to a
>> media type ("screen" | "print" | "projection" | "tv" | "handheld" |
>> "speech" etc).
>
> Not a bad idea, I suppose, but I'd like to understand more about the use  
> case for this kind of functionality. What *behaviour* (not presentation,  
> since that would be CSS) do you expect you'd change based on the active  
> media type?

Basically I want to be able to have some scripts associated with certain  
media types. For instance, I would like some scripts to *only* work in  
projection, or *only* in handheld.

> [Hmm, you could probably emulate this now: by using CSS's @media blocks,  
> and then detecting what style rules were active from script.]

Of course, but that's a dirty hack :)

> Secondly, is 'the current media type' only ever a single value, or can  
> more than one media type be active at one time (e.g., 'projection'  
> + 'screen'?).

That's a very good question actually, with a lot of debate surrounding  
it... let me quote the current CSS2.1 specs:

"Media types are mutually exclusive in the sense that a user agent can  
only support one media type when rendering a document. However, user  
agents may have different modes which support different media types."
<url: http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/media.html >

So basically there would probably be only media type active at the same  
time. However, there is a big problem when using a multimodal browser [1]  
which allows different modes visual/aural(/tactile) at the same time.

Different mediatypes would be mutually exclusive within a mode, e.g. you  
can't have screen and projection at the same time (they're in the same  
mode), but you can have projection and speech, or handheld and speech at  
the same time (they're in different modes). This isn't covered by the  
CSS2.1 specs (yet), but should definitely not be discussed here, but on  
the appropriate W3C list.

However, it doesn't matter much for our case how it is defined by the spec  
exactly. The proposed window.medium would return an array instead of a  
string. In a multimodal browser, it would then return screen,speech or  
print,speech (when in print preview) or handheld,speech (when using  
multimodal handheld).

> Finally, 'window.medium' is a really bad choice for the name. I know  
> that 'medium' is the right word (if only one can be active), but  
> no-one's going to associate 'medium' with 'active media type'.  
> 'mediaType' would be better.

Yeah, I could live with that argumentation.


[1] http://www.opera.com/pressreleases/en/2004/07/26/

-- 
Mark Schenk