[whatwg] suggestion for HTML5 spec

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 2 Aug 2010, Dirk Pranke wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 7:09 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> > On Mon, 2 Aug 2010, Dirk Pranke wrote:
> >> On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 6:56 PM, Ian Hickson <ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> >> > On Mon, 2 Aug 2010, Dirk Pranke wrote:
> >> >> >
> >> >> > Why would a user ever want anyone to disable their GPU 
> >> >> > acceleration?
> >> >>
> >> >> I believe I've heard people say that they might sometimes want 
> >> >> this for power management, i.e. performing the same computation on 
> >> >> the GPU might take more power than performing it more slowly on 
> >> >> the CPU. I imagine this would depend on the specific configuration 
> >> >> and computations involved, though.
> >> >
> >> > This seems like a matter for the user, not the Web page, though.
> >>
> >> Ah, I knew you were going to say this. I agree, but I can also 
> >> imagine that the way the user selects this is by choosing one of two 
> >> different resources from a page, just like we do today for videos of 
> >> different bandwidths.
> >
> > It seems better to have a way for the user agent to automaically 
> > negotiate the right bandwidth usage based on user preference, too.
> >
> > Any setting like this that we offer authors _will_ be misused, 
> > possibly as often as used correctly. Unless there's a really 
> > compelling reason to have it, it seems better to let the user be in 
> > control.
> 
> If users can choose between two links on a page labelled "high FPS - 
> will destroy your battery" and "low FPS", they are in control, in a way 
> that is easily understood by the user and allows them to make the choice 
> at the point in time that it matters. Compare this with changing the 
> streaming settings on QT Player or Windows Media Player, or even 
> toggling the "use the video card" button on your laptop (and hoping that 
> the content is smart enough to degrade gracefully instead of choking).

Agreed. That isn't my concern. My concern is with pages that only provide 
one version, and that version tweaks this setting inappropriately. I 
believe, based on our experience with how pages are written on the Web 
today, that pages that do that would far outnumber those doing it right.

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