[whatwg] Scripted querying of <video> capabilities

[Nils Dagsson Moskopp]

Am Dienstag, den 14.10.2008, 14:21 +0900 schrieb Dave Singer:
> At 20:06  +0000 13/10/08, Ian Hickson wrote:
> >On Thu, 7 Aug 2008, Dave Singer wrote:
> >>
> >>  In general, the source fallbacks are also a way to 'probe' this, albeit
> >>  in a very different way.
> >>
> >>  I'm not sure you can always get a definitive answer to the question "if
> >>  I gave you a file with this (extended) MIME type, could you play it?"
> >>  and I am fairly sure that asking the implementation to enumerate all the
> >>  types it could support would be hard.
> >
> >It is sad that we can't provide an API such as the requested one.
> 
> I agree, as it is useful for 'portal pages', where you can prompt the 
> user "you need to download and install X to view movies on this 
> site". 

What's a "portal page" - wouldn't it be the job of the Browser / Media Framework to prompt for codec installs ?

>This brings up another point, which is, is the "type" attribute on
><source> actually useful? Should we remove that and just have browsers
>probe the video subsystem for each resource? We can always add the
>attribute back later if it becomes useful again, but I'd rather not have
>something that isn't used by browsers, since then it'll be used wrong by
>authors, making it useless forever.

How exactly could browsers use it wrong ?


Cheers,

Nils