[whatwg] Thoughts on video accessibility

[Ian Hickson]

On Sat, 27 Dec 2008, Calogero Alex Baldacchino wrote:
> 
> A flying thought: why not thinking also to a further option for 
> embedding everything in a sort of "all-in-one" html page generated on 
> the fly when downloading, making of it a global container for video and 
> text to be consumed by UAs (while maintaining the opportunity to 
> download a video as a separate file, of course)? For instance, the video 
> itself might become the base64-encoded (or otherwise acceptably encoded) 
> value of a data-* attribute (or a more specific attribute) to be decoded 
> by a script (as well generated on the fly) and served to the video 
> engine as a "javascript:" url in place of the video src (or, perhaps 
> better, the UA might do that itself by supporting the "data:" protocol 
> as a valid source for the video, or a fragid pointing to an element 
> following the </video> tag, perhaps a <paintext> or something else, and 
> containing the encoded video); while text elements might wrap the 
> corresponding timed text file, to be embedded into the page as bare 
> text, similarly to a script code -- if a certain format contained <text> 
> tag, those might be changed into &lt;text&gt; or similarly (or perhaps 
> the file content might be encoded as well) to avoid conflicts with html 
> tags.
> 
> Of course, it's a "first-glance" idea, and needs further considerations 
> on its reliability (e.g. such an html page perhaps shouldn't be the 
> source set for a video in another page, and an option should be provided 
> to extract embedded contet; seeking might require a sequential decoding 
> to reach a desired point, and so on).

This idea seems out of scope for HTML5; it can already be done using 
features like multipart/related or data: URLs.

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'