[whatwg] <INCLUDE> and links with @rel=embed

[Tab Atkins Jr.]

On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 1:12 PM, Ashley Sheridan
<ash at ashleysheridan.co.uk> wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-08-06 at 12:43 -0700, Tab Atkins Jr. wrote:
>> Do browsers supply a file extension for un-extensioned files based on
>> the mimetype?  I didn't think they did.  A file without an extension
>> confuses most people.
>
> It would confused Windows users mostly, who have no way to detect a file type that has no extension. Linux and Mac users will generally be in a better position.

That would be "most users".  ^_^


>>> "Virtually always" seems like an overstatement based on how often I
>>> see people extract sound tracks from Youtube videos (and how I often I
>>> see people don't in part due to them only having a dumb one-off
>>> Flash-based video player). Or try to sequence playing of arbitrary
>>> songs from Youtube with multiple browser windows + manual play/pausing
>>> hackery. Or other things that would be trivial with their usual media
>>> player.
>>
>> You're running with a very non-representative crowd if those are the
>> sorts of things your friends do.
>
> I'm not sure you can say that's non-representative without supplying some sort of backup evidence. The very fact that people do this sort of thing should be enough for a use-case. As it is though, despite having issues with Flash video on Linux (my platform of choice) I would prefer it as a backup in-case I didn't have the right codecs installed. This will likely apply more to Windows users though, as a default Windows install (I'm basing this on XP, which is still extremely popular and is the latest version of Windows with which I'm very familiar) doesn't come with a huge range of codecs.

Oh, I don't doubt the use-case.  That case is served quite well right
now, as all browsers expose a "Save As..." option in the video context
menu.  I'm disputing that it's the *common* case, such that it needs
to be explicitly catered to.


>>> And as SVG is not universally supported, what if I want to offer some
>>> logos/icons/images as both (gzipped) SVG and PNG?
>>
>> SVG is in the process of being universally supported right now.  Once
>> IE9 is out, every modern browser will support it.
>
> There's still a huge amount of XP users about (going by various statistics sites) which won't ever support IE9. Also, XP SP3 is supported until at least 2014, so there's likely a whole slew of Windows machines that will never see IE9. I think it's fairly safe to say that the majority of these will be business machines, and many corporate environments won't allow extraneous software, such as an alternative browser, to be installed. As such, it's back to Flash again as a default fallback, as that is the only thing that can be almost guaranteed in that sort of environment.

Like I said just after this section of my email, you'll be able to
serve SVG long before you'll be able to serve a generic media
container with fallback ability.

If a user is stuck with an outdated browser that won't show SVG,
*they're stuck with an outdated browser*.  Even if we introduced
something that will automatically fallback from SVG to PNG, IE6-8 will
still fail to show anything.

~TJ