[whatwg] <video> element feedback

[Sander Tekelenburg]

[My apologies for initially responding off-list. That was unintentional. I'm
posting an updated version.]

At 20:04 +0000 UTC, on 2007-03-21, Martin Atkins wrote:

> Sander Tekelenburg wrote:
>>
>> [...] <URL:http://domain.example/movie.ogg#21:08>, to mean "fetch the
>> movie and start playing it at 21 minutes 8 seconds into the movie". [...]
>
> When using this with HTML we don't link to #line50, or #paragraph3, or
> #section9, we link to an anchor in the document itself. We do this to
> avoid tying the link to a specific representation of the resource, and
> to allow the document to change to a certain extent without breaking the
> links.

FWIW, RFC 3986, under 3.5, seems to me to specifically mentions this "[...]
Although this separate handling is often perceived to be a loss of
information, particularly for accurate redirection of references as resources
move over time, it also serves to prevent information providers from denying
reference authors the right to refer to information within a resource
selectively. Indirect referencing also provides additional flexibility and
extensibility to systems that use URIs, as new media types are easier to
define and deploy than new schemes of identification."

It seems to me that what I'm proposing is very much in the spirit of this.

> I don't know of a video container format that allows named anchors to be
> specified, though.

QuickTime let's authors define points in a .mov container as "chapters",
which, in the cotext of the Web, could function as named anchors I'd think. I
believe this is in fact already possible today with QT authored movies.

But I didn't get the impression that this authoring aspect matters. In fact,
the essence of my suggestion is exactly that this would be an opportunity to
allow for fragment identifiers without any need for authors to do any extra
work.

If the spec requires UAs to be able to return the movie's "duration" and
"current position", etc. (which I got the impression is the intention of both
Opera and Apple's proposals), to for instance allow, through javascript,
playing from a certain point, then I don't see why it would not be possible
to trigger the same event through a fragment identifier. I don't see how this
would require anything from the author.

> The interpretation of fragment identifiers on video is a bit out of
> scope for an HTML specification regardless of whether it's specified as
> time or a bookmark. If someone invents a video format that allows named
> anchors, they can write in their own specification how fragment
> identifiers are to be interpreted. It's none of HTML's business.

Quoting that last bit of RFC 3986, section 3.5 again: "[...] Indirect
referencing also provides additional flexibility and extensibility to systems
that use URIs, as new media types are easier to define and deploy than new
schemes of identification".

The discussion here of a video element, for native playback of even a
specific codec, seems to come quite close to that.

(That aside, a lot of what is being defined on this list is javascript, not
HTML. The popular term "HTML5" is misguiding. The offical name "Web Apps 1.0"
is more descriptive.)


-- 
Sander Tekelenburg
The Web Repair Initiative: <http://webrepair.org/>