[whatwg] Re: media types
Malcolm Rowe
malcolm-what at farside.org.uk
Mon Jul 26 06:45:21 PDT 2004
Jonny Axelsson writes:
> The most immediate use cases would be to have presentation-type
> behaviours for projection, or less behaviours for handheld.
Ok. Something like 'if media=projection, bind arrow keys to move to
next/previous section'? That sounds fair enough. I'm a firm believer in the
'one document to rule them all' device-independence idea, but there's no
reason to prevent authors from customising for specific devices, I guess.
Should the UA fire an event when changing the media type? (Opera's
full-screen mode, for example).
Hmm. Would this make it easy for authors to prevent pages from being
printed? I wouldn't want that.
>> [dirty hack]
> Yes you can, but that must be considered a rather ugly hack.
I know. I never suggested it was a good idea, but I'm rather pleased with
the 'eurgh' response it seems to have elicited from everyone. :-)
> No, a given canvas can only have one media type. Projection and screen
> (and print and ...) are mutually exclusive. But you can have different
> media type for each window.
Ok - and on a 'multi-modal' browser, you effectively have more than one
'window'? (though only one 'current position', the same in each window, I
guess).
>> 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.
> This would be more confusing. Whether or not this is a good habit, many
> window and document properties have been aliased, and document.mediaType
> would be more likely to be assumed to be the MIME content type (e.g.
> text/html).
You said above that each window can have a different media type, so it
doesn't make sense to talk about the 'media type' of a document - it's
purely a presentational thing. In principle, I wouldn't strenuously object
to reflecting a window property into the document property, though I don't
know which one you'd choose in a multi-modal UA (then again, I assume that
multi-modal UAs still only make one of those windows available in the
'window' property, so I guess it'd be that one).
No, the thing that I was objecting to more was that the noun 'medium',
without any context, is far from obvious as a description. I'm not sure that
'mediaType' is that likely to be confused with Content-Type, but if it is,
use something else. I just think that someone reading 'window.medium' is
likely to think: "what about window.small or window.large?". I know I would.
Regards,
Malcolm
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