[whatwg] Video proposals

[Matthew Raymond]

Gareth Hay wrote:
>>    Sure. What happens if you're taking old videos of a page because  
>> you moved them to a site like YouTube? How would you tell them apart
>> from other content in the page that might require <object>, like SVG
>> graphics and such?
> 
> I think this kind of reasoning leads us logically to tags for  
> everything. (Which I don't think is a good idea fwiw)

   Not if new elements are based on significant use cases. Considering
the popularity of YouTube and other video sites, I'd say that a use case
for <video> is a safe bet.

   Also keep in mind that, using your logic, we should eliminate <img>
because you can use <object> instead. (In fact, that makes more sense
because <object> has better fallback than <img>, whereas <video> has
equivalent fallback.)

> If I wanted to isolate all SVG content from a page and [the page] also  
> contains flash but the previous incumbent didn't use MIME then I am  
> also stuck, but again, if the actual content has gone from the  
> [Internet] a MIME type isn't going to help me much.

   I would not consider pages with both SVG and Flash all that common.
It's far more likely that you'd see video and Flash. In fact, they may
be using Flash to play videos, so because there isn't a <video> element
to allow native, integrated video support, there may be no means of
determining of something is even a video without analyzing the Flash
data itself.

> There are of course other use cases, such as wanting to specify an  
> object in general terms and have it change over time. For example if  
> I have a video file, I can swap codecs should I need to, and not need  
> to alter the page at all.

   Another issue is that while Flash may eventually disappear from the
'Net, video isn't going anywhere.