[whatwg] Video (Was: How not to fix HTML)

[Christoph Päper]

*Ian Hickson*, 2006-10-30:
>
> Sure. FWIW, there's a lot of interest in browser vendors about  
> introducing
> a <video> element or some such (or maybe making browsers natively  
> support
> video in <object>, or both).

I think it would be helpful to /explicitly/ allow content types  
(alias media types) in |type| of |object| to omit the subtype, e.g.:

   <object type="video" data="foo.mpv"/>
   <object type="audio" data="foo.mpa"/>
   <object type="image" data="foo.png"/>       ~= <img src="foo.png">
   <object type="application" data="foo.swf"/> ~= <embed src="foo.swf"/>
   <object type="text" data="foo.txt"/>        ~= <iframe  
src="foo.txt"/>

Maybe this is all the support for this element type that should be  
required from conforming implementations. Furthermore |width| and | 
height| should be required for freely scalable formats, but OTOH not  
apply to 'audio' types (i.e. always equal zero), and exclude the  
space required for an optional inline GUI.

I never understood, by the way, why videos and Flash-like content  
shouldn't work within |img|. (Parameters can be specified in URIs.)

I could also envision an HTML5 where |alt| was optional for (or even  
removed from) |img|, which in return was only allowed to be used for  
optional, decorative images (and perhaps likewise |embed|). Every  
illustration conveying meaning was then to be embedded using |object|  
(including descriptive content, but nesting |object|s would be  
discouraged, although allowed) or more sophisticated methods. This  
wouldn't keep many correctly authored existing pages conformant, though.