[whatwg] media resources: addressing media fragments through URIs spec

[Philip Jägenstedt]

On Wed, 30 Jun 2010 14:11:44 +0200, Silvia Pfeiffer  
<silviapfeiffer1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> The W3C WG for media fragments has published a Last Call Working Draft
> at http://www.w3.org/TR/media-frags/ .
>
> The idea of the spec is to enable addressing sub-parts of audio-visual
> resources through URIs, such as http://example.com/video.ogv?t=10,40
> to address seconds 10-40 out of video.ogv. This is relevant for use in
> the <audio> and <video> elements and can help focus the playback to a
> specific subpart.
>
> This specification will provide "deep linking" as a standard
> specification for media resources.
>
> Incidentally, such functionality is also available at YouTube, see
> http://www.google.com/support/youtube/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=116618
> .
>
> "The Working Group encourages feedback about this document by
> developers and researchers who have interest in multimedia content
> addressing and retrieval on the web and by developers and researchers
> who have interest in Semantic Web technologies for content description
> and annotation. Please send comments about this document to
> public-media-fragment at w3.org mailing list (public archive) by 27
> August 2010."
>
> Cheers,
> Silvia.
>

I'd like to chime in here and encourage everybody to review the spec. I  
have been participating in the MF WG under the assumption that this is  
something we will couple with <video>. From an implementor perspective,  
the main (blocking) issue with the spec is that it doesn't define how to  
parse a MF URI, so I hope other potential implementors and spec-junkies  
will pay some attention to this and comment as appropriate.

P.S. a more relevant example for browsers would be <video  
src="video.ogv#t=10,40">, as MF in the query component is strictly a  
server-side matter.

-- 
Philip Jägenstedt
Core Developer
Opera Software