[whatwg] <video> element proposal

[Nicholas Shanks]

On 1 Mar 2007, at 11:56, Anne van Kesteren wrote:

> 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...

Would I be right in thinking of <video> as inheriting from/a subclass  
of <object> then, to draw an OOP analogy. Or would they be more like  
siblings?

Secondly, I think of ‘video’ as a sequence of visual frames with no  
audio. I presume you mean something more akin to what I call a movie  
container, with a video track, multiple audio dubbing tracks in  
different languages, subtitles or graphical overlays, &c.
If so, do you think the name could be altered to reflect this?

Thirdly, are you intending for there to be <audio> counterpart?

>> 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.

Video streams/files already contain their native pixel dimensions,  
and as Henri said, you never know what you're going to GET. A better  
attribute would be "scale" which takes a floating point value,  
defaulting to 1.0 (should probably have a corresponding CSS element  
too, which we could apply to other things that have native dimensions  
like still images). This would work well with max-/min-width.
You may want to consider aspect ratio too:  ratio="preserve" being  
default, ratio="1.333" could indicate 4:3 or get tricky and accept  
"16:9" for precision reasons.

- Nicholas.
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