Re: Public feedback on HTML5 video

On Mon, Dec 28, 2009 at 5:36 PM, Leif Halvard Silli
<xn--mlform-iua@xn--mlform-iua.no> wrote:
> I assume that the reason e.g Webkit has been eager to
> buffer things, has been in order to provide a better user experience -
> my theory has always been that improved user experience has been the
> motivation for this. Therefore I can very well understand that one is
> sceptical about putting the ultimate judgement into the hands of the
> user agents.

Your assumption does not match the impression I got from Maciejs
email. It sounded like they only wanted to download enough information
to calculate the duration of the video, but limitations in the
QuickTime framework used to implement <video> made it impossible, or
too hard, at this time to do that without downloading the entire
video.

So it sounded like the choice to download was one based on technical
limitations, not one based on desired user experience.

> Can we be certain that the user agent _does not_ autobuffer when the
> autobuffer attribute isn't used? Or is this also up to the user agent?

We can't ever be certain UAs will, or won't, do anything. As a
developer of firefox *I* can't even be certain that firefox will, or
won't, do anything. This is because users install addons into firefox
that do all sorts of things that are outside of my control. I'd
certainly expect someone to write an addon that affects how buffering
will work in firefox, and I expect users to install that addon.

So yes, it is definitely up to the user agent.

What we can do, is to say what behavior is conformant to the HTML5 spec.

/ Jonas

Received on Monday, 28 December 2009 22:32:25 UTC