[whatwg] Html 5 video element's poster attribute

[Silvia Pfeiffer]

On Tue, Sep 21, 2010 at 3:03 PM, Shiv Kumar <skumar at exposureroom.com> wrote:

>  >For the pause state you will have to use the onpause event to make any
> changes. But to be honest, I doubt anyone would want to show the poster in
> >pause state. I have not >seen that anywhere yet and I have come across a
> sizeable number of video sites. Can you point to a single one that currently
> >loads a poster image when you press pause?
>
>  Someone here mentioned Voddler. I’ve seen a few, but I can’t recall. Some
> of our content producers have requested this too but we’ve not provided them
> with this feature.
>

Hmm... voddler is not available in my country. :( Any other examples? I'm
really trying to understand the use case here.



> Can you give me a good reason/case for not having a simple method (with no
> side effects) to make a poster visible/invisible?
>


I can see the use case for when the video is finished and "rewinds" to the
start, and I can see a means to address that without having more attributes.

But I cannot see the need for having it mid-video on pause. In fact, I would
regard that as pretty poor user interface design actually because you would
be seeing the representative poster rather than the current video frame,
giving you no indication whatsoever where in the video you currently are.
Often when people pause a video they do that to check out what is going on
in these frames, e.g. to read some text that is in the frame. Replacing that
context frame with a poster makes no sense to me and actually reduces
usability. It's particularly bad for people who may need longer to grasp
some visual content in the scene than your average user, so it also
negatively influences accessibility. I haven't seen a case yet that speaks
for having this feature, but I can already come up with two good reasons for
not having that feature.

Regards,
Silvia.
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