[whatwg] audio and video: volume and muted as content attributes?

[Bjartur Thorlacius]

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>Bjartur Thorlacius <svartman95 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Play-during can stop, autoplay and repeat sounds.
>> It's not obvious to me how this will apply to elements that represent
>> audiovisual content but volume: silent; unambiguously mutes content.
>> Decorating audio (such as background music in games or videos)
>> seem to be even more easily styled for some reason. Multiple
>> soundtracks can be muxed and assigned different loudness.
>> Also @media aural {display: none;} can be used on audio elements
>> but I haven't read the specs properly so I don't know if that would hide
>> an <video> element when inside of an @media aural clause.
>>
>> CSS 3 aural has still to be done so more capabilities may be suggested.
>>
>Has there been any discussion about implementing support for CSS2
>aural in Web browsers? Until such a time - and in fact independently
>of that - I still think turning the existing volume and muted IDL
>attributes into content attributes would be a nice and simple
>solution. Introducing a whole CSS aural control section will take lots
>longer IMHO. Also, it won't hurt to have both - we do that for width
>and height, too.
It seems much more "The Right Way"(tm) to do such things in CSS.
Browsers don't have to conform to the whole aural specification nor
the speech module of CSS 3. I think CSS 3 will have seperate speech
and aural modules which would solve the problem entirely. Note also
that CSS 2 aural allows styling of cues. As there's a workaround
implementation time isn't the number one priority.
There's need for the capability so saying that it shouldn't be
implemented because of lack of discussion seems weird.
Lachlan Hunt <lachlan.hunt at lachy.id.au> wrote:
>On 2010-06-01 13:09, Bjartur Thorlacius wrote:
>> On 5/31/10, Silvia Pfeiffer <silviapfeiffer1 at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>> I am not aware of a CSS property for media elements that lets you
>>> control the muted state. Can you link me to a specification?
>>
>> Well, http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/aural.html defines volume and
>> play-during. Play-during can stop, autoplay and repeat sounds.
>> It's not obvious to me how this will apply to elements that represent
>> audiovisual content but volume: silent; unambiguously mutes content.
>
>Those properties were designed for aural browsers using speech synthesis 
>to read the content of a page, not to control multimedia in a page 
>itself.
Well, sounds are to speech/text as images are to (written) text.
You can float both paragraphs and images because to CSS they're just boxes.
I don't see a reason not to allow authors to control the volume of sound
if they can do so with speech.

As for play-during it's so general that it might be included in interactive
visual media as well.
>Also, attempting to hijack those properties for use with 
>multimedia content could create difficulties as you would have to define 
>how the HTMLMediaElement's volume and muted properties interact with 
>those CSS properties, if at all.
How's it done for other visual/behavioral content attributes in HTML?
Align, color and in fact most of the attributes of <font> have similiar
problems.