[whatwg] So if media-queries aren't for determining the media to be used what are they for?

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On May 15, 2012, at 3:06 PM, Chris Heilmann <codepo8 at gmail.com> wrote:

> I also wonder what we do with videos? Surely they have the same issues and there is no proposal for changing the syntax there.

With current codecs, and given human perception of visual images, videos can be decoded at multiple resolutions without as obvious visual degradation as images. Even at 1:1 scale, videos as served by many popular sites have significant visual artifacts. So for videos, we're still in the real of straight tradeoff of visual quality for bandwidth and/or size. Generally, increasing the bitrate will increase quality on all displays, and there's not much purpose to doing it selectively.

In theory, resolution-based selection could apply to the poster attribute of <video>, as well as to <input type=img src>. But it seems reasonable to figure things out fully and get some deployment experience with img before extending this feature.

 - Maciej