[whatwg] <video> element proposal

[Anne van Kesteren]

On Thu, 01 Mar 2007 12:27:49 +0100, Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis  
<bhawkeslewis at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> Opera has some internal expiremental builds with an implementation of a
>> <video> element.
>
> Interesting. I just wanted to ask for a bit more detail on how this
> works in practice and what it can be used for. How would this support
> audio descriptions, captions, and subtitles? e.g. Can the captions be
> displayed to match user preferences for fonts and so forth and exposed
> to accessibility frameworks? Might it support any form of hyperfilm
> (e.g. clicking on something in the film like one can click on parts of a
> Flickr photograph, changing perspective etc) or is it intended only for
> traditional linear video? (These capabilities look like potential
> advantages of SMIL.)

Everything with regards to the <video> element what we currently support  
is mentioned in the specification I attached (well, minus some bugs).


>> From an accessibility point of view (not to mention an interoperability
>> one), doesn't the draft spec need to mandate the inclusion of a
>> fallback?

I'm not sure what fallback has to do with interoperability. Mandating a  
fallback would probably be good...


>> And what do play() pause() stop() etc do when video-playing is
>> unavailable and the fallback content is displayed instead?

Open issue. Maybe they should throw an INVALID_STATE_ERR or something.


> The draft spec shows the addition of button elements by the content
> producer. Would it be better from a usability and efficiency point of
> view (both for authors and viewers) for UAs to generate the UI
> themselves? (Or at least, since some interfaces might have more complex
> and innovative functionality, to have the UA's own UI as default, and
> allow a boolean attribute to disable the default generated interface?
> e.g. customui="customui").

It doesn't seem wise to mandate a particular UI. User agents are free of  
course to expose the functionality of play(), pause() and stop() in some  
way, in my opinion.


-- 
Anne van Kesteren
<http://annevankesteren.nl/>
<http://www.opera.com/>