[whatwg] <video> element proposal

Anne van Kesteren annevk at opera.com
Thu Mar 1 03:56:32 PST 2007


On Thu, 01 Mar 2007 06:27:45 +0100, Shadow2531 <shadow2531 at gmail.com>  
wrote:
>> Opera has some internal expiremental builds with an implementation of a
>> <video> element. The element exposes a simple API (for the moment) much
>> like the Audio() object:
>
> I think it'd be cool if the video element *just* supported theora.

It probably doesn't make much sense to impose such restrictions.


> If it supports whatever the browser wants to implement, we'd have to
> do like the following I think.
>
> <video src="test.wmv">
>     <video src="test.mpg">
>         <video src="test.ogg>
>             I give up
>         </video>
>     </video>
> </video>

The intentention of the draft is that this is allowed. It might not be  
specified entirely correct though. Hence the "proposal" status :-)


> You probably want the video element to be really, really basic, but I
> don't think it should be. It needs to have some features (eventually).
> These are just some of the things *I* might like.
>
> [...]

That's one of the reasons a dedicated element is better than reusing the  
<object> element. All the new video specific APIs would otherwise have to  
be defined for all possible things the <object> element can represent  
(images, nested browser context, video, audio, plugins, etc.). Given that  
the <object> element is already a nightmare for implementors...


> I assume you want the width and height attributes to be used only for
> specifying the original width and height the video was made at, and
> css should be used to set the width and height to a % or px etc.?

Yeah, maybe. I was thinking about something along those lines, but I  
couldn't really figure out how it would work.


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



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