[whatwg] Serving up Theora <video> in the real world

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Fri, Jul 10, 2009 at 4:57 AM, Robert O'Callahan<robert at ocallahan.org> wrote:
> The way we've implemented in Firefox, we'll return "yes" if you specify a
> codecs parameter and we support every codec in your list. So
> v.canPlayType("video/ogg; codecs=vorbis,theora") returns "probably" in
> Firefox 3.5. I think this is reasonable because I believe that, modulo bugs
> in our implementation, we support the full Theora and Vorbis specs. On the
> other hand, we will return "maybe" for v.canPlayType("video/ogg"). I think
> this distinction will be useful.

In what use-case would an author want to make use of the distinction?
In either case, your only course of action is to try playing the
video.  Maybe you'd try testing all the video types you support, and
if one is "maybe" while another is "probably" you'd go with
"probably"?  That seems like a pretty marginal use case to help for
the sake of such a confusing API.  Programmers expect binary logic,
not ternary (look at the complaints about SQL's NULL).