[whatwg] Scripted querying of <video> capabilities

[timeless]

On Fri, Aug 8, 2008 at 10:13 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Or have I been shot down already?

I'd like to shoot you down.

javascript should not be required to play media. sniffing apps are
historically bad, and shouldn't be encouraged.

there should be no harm in using multiple sources if there is, please
explain what it is so that we can see if that needs to be fixed.

I'm working on a product which delivers flash 9.0.31 and we have
someone who complained that their browser was told that they needed
flash 9.0.47. While it's pretty, it's mostly annoying. I wish they
didn't do the sniffing and just made things work.I suspect if they
didn't sniff, things would just work.

A lot of the browsers I deal with run w/o js for various reasons. (I
wonder what the plan is for <video> in html-mail [thunderbird, etc.])

It sounds very clearly that this is not something which browser
vendors could usefully implement (and I know that my browser team
would be forced to do its own work here, and from a historical review,
i know that we did a bad job of advertising our mime types for our
media plugin, which means this thing would be bad too).

We'd probably be forced to lie and claim every codec imaginable.