Re: Firing media events early for throttled downloads

On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 1:45 AM, Silvia
Pfeiffer<silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 5:03 AM, Boris Zbarsky<bzbarsky@mit.edu> wrote:
>> John Foliot wrote:
>>>
>>> LOL, I never actually suggested removing autoplay pre-se, but *DID*
>>> suggest that we not advocate it any documentation.
>>
>> I'm not actually sure what you mean by that...
>>
>>> White listing would certainly be one way of going forward (excellent
>>> feature for UAs), but I am thinking that it needs to be slightly 'deeper' in
>>> the mix - that the end user would/could start with a baseline setting of
>>> 'never' (vs. always) - the potential for 'harm' is substantial enough that
>>> it needs to be hard-wired in the UA (rather than a scripted setting - if I
>>> am understanding your proposal fully).
>>
>> Again, I'm not sure what you're saying.  I'm thinking a user experience much
>> like the popup blocker in Firefox, say.  When the page tries to start
>> playing at a time when it's clear that the user didn't request it (including
>> the autoplay attribute), the UA prevents the action and notifies the user.
>
> There is also an autoplay blocker plugin for YouTube for Firefox. I
> think that's the functionality that should be available as a setting
> in browsers for the video and audio elements, rather than a plugin.
> But I am not too worried about it - I'm sure there will be
> greasemonkey scripts that will do that for us if the browser vendors
> don't decide to go forward with it.

Like Silvia, I'm not worried about this either.

Like I have said before, having specs demand UI behavior is a bad
idea. It's much better that we let browsers competition produce a good
UI. Whatever we can think of here is unlikely to be the optimal UI, so
lets instead see what browser developers are able to come up with. If
having a visible UI to turn on or off autoplay support is important,
whichever browser adds that first is going to gain users leading to
other browsers also implementing that.

Once popups got to be an annoyance to people, browsers started
implementing popup blockers. And once the first browser had
implemented it, others quickly followed. In the case of popups it
unfortunately took longer than it should because browser competition
was almost non-existant. That is no longer the case since we have
several strong players on the market.

So lets put in the specs the things that are important for
interoperability, and then trust the market to produce good UI. (as
long as adequate UI is possible at all)

/ Jonas

Received on Monday, 8 June 2009 09:03:36 UTC