[whatwg] Full screen for the <video> element

Jonas Sicking jonas at sicking.cc
Fri Oct 26 11:22:24 PDT 2007


Greg Houston wrote:
> With javascript it is already possible to make full screen web pages.
> If advertisers were going to exploit this they would have by now.

On my browser it is not. In firefox I can and do disable the ability for 
javascript to move or resize windows because web pages insist on 
annoying me by resizing to fullscreen.

The only reason we don't disable this by default in firefox is that a 
lot of sites have come to depend on being able to resize windows. So 
lots of users are paying the price of annoying maximizing windows in 
order for us to support the few legitimate websites that resize windows.

Had the resize api not been there in the first place those legitimate 
websites would have come to depend on it and would have worked fine.

Lets not do the same mistake again.

> Standardizing full screen video mode seems like a good idea since
> users will learn what to expect and how to navigate it. Otherwise, you
> potentially have a 1000 different implementations of fullscreen mode
> devised by designers requiring the end user to figure out each time
> how to navigate that particular implementation.

I imagine what will happen is that pages will create a <video> that 
covers the whole content area of the current window and then have some 
mechanism that minimizes the video again.

I could see an argument for having an API that maximizes the video 
within the content area of the current window and adds some sort of 
browser specific UI to minimize it again.

However, it isn't clear that sites will prefer that over having their 
users choose 'fullscreen' from the context menu (or whatever other UI 
the browser chooses to use).

Actually, the more I think about it the more I like the idea of an API 
for "fullwindow". What do other people think?

/ Jonas



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