[whatwg] <video> element proposal

[Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis]

Anne van Kesteren wrote:

> I'm not sure what fallback has to do with interoperability. 

Fallback allows text mode browsers or video plugins that do not support
a given codec to access the essential information. Hence it makes for a
form of communication interoperable with a wide range of devices. (i.e.
it doesn't make the video interoperable, it makes the website
interoperable.)

> It doesn't seem wise to mandate a particular UI. 

Sorry, I've obviously been unclear. I don't mean tell UAs what UI to
use, I mean tell them what minimal functionality to expose (e.g. "UAs
should allow users to pause video."). /How/ they do that (play button,
mouse gestures, telepathy, etc.) should be up to them entirely (subject
to UAAG considerations of course).

> User agents are free of course to expose the functionality of play(), 
> pause() and stop() in some way, in my opinion.

Isn't it important that content authors know whether there will or won't
be an automatic UI provided, so that end users don't end up being
presented with two (possibly conflicting, certainly confusing) UIs?
That's why I suggested using an attribute to control  For most
use-cases, I suspect the minimum functionality would not only be more
than enough, but superior than anything the content producer would put
together. This would actually make it a lot easier for ordinary HTML
authors to put video on the web. If we could mandate captioning and
audio description exposure by UAs it would make putting video on the web
in an accessible manner much easier too. Which would be great, as it
currently seems to be a somewhat complicated task.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis