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

[Philip Jägenstedt]

On Wed, 16 May 2012 03:50:21 +0200, Silvia Pfeiffer  
<silviapfeiffer1 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Wed, May 16, 2012 at 9:20 AM, Odin Hørthe Omdal <odinho at opera.com>  
> wrote:

>> I'm not sure. What do you think? As far as I've seen, you're highly
>> knowledgeable about <video>. Why do we have mediaqueries on video  
>> element?
>> Do we have a use case page?
>
> Hehe, thanks. :-) But media queries were in <video> before I arrived,
> so I missed the whole discussion around it and how it got there. Some
> of the browsers that implement support for it should speak up.

We have supported the media attribute since the first stable release with  
<video> (Opera 10.50) and Git blames me. However, I must say that I just  
added it because it was in the spec and don't remember any discussion  
about it. Some digging shows that it was added to the spec in  
<http://html5.org/r/724>, but I don't know why.

As far as I can tell, it's mostly useless and I've never heard of it  
actually being used. The correct way to handle different screen sizes and  
bandwidth constraints is adaptive streaming. Simon Pieters has suggested  
simply dropping the attribute and I would not object to that.

-- 
Philip Jägenstedt
Core Developer
Opera Software