[whatwg] <video> element proposal

[Anne van Kesteren]

On Thu, 01 Mar 2007 17:42:56 +0100, Nicholas Shanks  
<contact at nickshanks.com> 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?

<video> wouldn't have the functionality <object> has and vice versa. That  
might make them 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?

I don't really have an opinion on this. It seems though that similar  
formats also call this <video>.


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

I suppose in due course there would be an element for streaming sound,  
songs, etc., yes. Audio() is just for effects triggered through scripting.


> 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.

That seems rather presentational and it's unclear to me what the use cases  
are. Currently the height="" and width="" attribute on <video> behave like  
they behave on <img>.


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