[whatwg] Scripted querying of <video> capabilities

[James Ide]

On Tue, Aug 12, 2008 at 3:46 PM, Chris Double <chris.double at double.co.nz>wrote:

> A browser that supports <video> but not Ogg will not use the fallback
> <object>. Instead it will just give an error when loading the foo.ogg
> file.
>

In this case I believe it would be possible to listen to the `error' event
and dynamically insert fallback content if the <video> element has an error
state of MEDIA_ERR_DECODE. However, this fails when using <source> elements
as the resource-selecting algorithm just terminates if all of the media
sources are of unsupported types. More complications arise when we consider
cases where only a subset of the codecs in the resource are supported and
different events are fired and error codes set.

I agree that there should be some type of fallback mechanism in place,
perhaps akin to how <object> deals with unsupported data. Currently <source>
fills in some of the gaps by providing fallback support to a degree, but I
feel that there should be a more comprehensive solution that encourages
authors to use <video>, with or without <source>, but also provides a safety
net by allowing currently existing fallback solutions to function as
expected. Intuitively, I would expect <video> with an unsupported codec to
behave as if the <video> element itself were unsupported, with perhaps a
small note on how to acquire the codec(s) required to play the media, if the
UA can determine that much and is configured to display such messages.

Just some thoughts,
- James
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