[whatwg] video tag : loop for ever

[Eduard Pascual]

On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 12:18 PM, João Eiras <joao.eiras at gmail.com> wrote:
> Do you feel like overspecifiying this? Or do you prefer to have just
> either an integer, or a keyword in playcount=""? You've been doing the
> later in CSS for years, and so far browser implementors and spec
> writers have not complained.

I quite agree with this idea. For a number, I think -1 would be ideal:
it is already used by lots of desktop software to convey similar
meanings, and could have an interesting benefit implementation-wise:
if the 2's complement representation of the number is interpreted as
an unsigned integer, then it will represent the highest respresentable
value (ie: hex FFFF for 16-bit, or FFFF FFFF FFFF FFFF for 64-bit),
just due to the way 2's complement works.
I also find the idea of using a keyword quite reasonable, but choosing
a good keyword may be quite difficult. Also, since keywords are
generally based on English, and not all web authors are
English-speakers, I don't think it's a good idea to have more keywords
than needed. Another option would be to allow both the keyword and the
number; and I think that'd be the best option. Anyway, implementing
this feature should be almost trivial.