[whatwg] <video>, <object>, Timed Media Elements

[Ian Hickson]

On Thu, 22 Mar 2007, ddailey wrote:
>
> As a newcomer to this group, please forgive my ignorance of discussions 
> that, undoubtedly, have already taken place, but as I have been reading 
> these threads on <video> and timed media and <object>, a couple of 
> questions have come to mind:
> 
> 1. why not just include SMIL as a part of HTML, much in the same way 
> that it is integrated with SVG? It is an existing W3C reco.

SMIL was considered, but several factors led to us deciding not to use it 
in HTML5:

 - We got strong feedback from existing producers of video on the Web that 
   their experience with SMIL had been universally disappointing.

 - The SMIL model is based around XML and namespaces, which isn't really 
   compatible with text/html and HTML5.

 - SMIL's conceptual model wasn't a good fit for the requirements we had 
   in mind for <video>.


> 2. For content such as XML, MathML, SVG, ChemML... that one would like 
> to embed in an HTML document could there not be some sort of tag 
> (<object> was supposed to work, but doesn't in some browsers) like say
> 
>        <dom data="some.xml" id="D">
> 
> for which the DOM associated with the XML content would be easily 
> accessible through script as with:
> 
>        XMLDoc=document.getElementById("D").getXMLDocument.
> 
> It seems as though external things which have DOMs are quite different 
> that other sorts of media and may deserve their own tag.

For XML content you can use <object> or <iframe> and the contentDocument 
attribute to obtain the Document object.

HTH,
-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'