[whatwg] Start position of media resources

[Silvia Pfeiffer]

On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 4:46 AM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Apr 2009, David Singer wrote:
>> >
>> > Navigation outside the indicated range could be done in several ways -
>> > it does not have to be through indicating the full length of the
>> > resource in the timeline.
>>
>> surely.  but which one can the URL/page author expect?  If I pick an
>> innocuous scene out of an R-rated movie and put it on a web page for
>> children, can they easily see other parts of the movie or not?
>
> I think the answer to this should be "yes".

I agree thus far.

> For example if someone on
> reddit links to a particular part of a video, as a user I should trivially
> (by dragging the scrubber) be able to see the context. I don't think we
> should be changing the timeline just because the author set a start and
> end position somehow.

I understand that this makes sense in a lot of cases - e.g. in
something like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHXuXWznFgk#t=5s .

However, I would actually prefer if we make the full resource
available in a different manner. The reason is that when you link to a
small segment that is part of a long resource - e.g. 30 seconds out of
a 5 hour long video - your selection on the timeline is not visible
and it is unclear where the segment is playing and you're unable to
scrub around the segment properly.

Maybe we can introduce a toggle button that allows the timeline to
show/hide context, in particular for long resources? Or we could
introduce a attribute that says context="true/false" depending on what
the page author prefers is being done with the segment? This would
also allow to hide the context in cases such as the one that David
described. Not that it can be completely hidden - anyone who
understands URLs will be able to load the full resource. But it will
make it more difficult.

Regards,
Silvia.