Re: Systematic access to media/plugin metadata

On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 8:49 PM, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> wrote:
> On Wed, 2011-04-13 at 12:01 +0200, Danny Ayers wrote:
>> > As far as I can tell, the use cases you included called for browser UI
>> > features--not for an API.
>>
>> I don't think so...the UI parts for directing someone to a hotel or
>> alerting them to something in a photo could be handled by regular
>> DOM/HTML, <canvas> or SVG. The only bit that can't easily be fulfilled
>> right now is access to the metadata.
>
> If the scenario is that someone puts a image with metadata on a server
> and without the author doing anything else, the browser can alert the
> user about stuff, then it's about a built-in browser feature that
> doesn't have expose anything to JS.
>
> If the scenario is that someone puts an image with metadata on a server
> *and* supplies a JavaScript program that uses DOM/HTML, canvas or SVG to
> alert the user about the metadata, the author controls both the image
> and the alert mechanism, so the author might as well extract the
> metadata on the server side (like e.g. Flickr does) and transfer the
> extracted data to the browser using whatever existing means.
>
> The server is a notable part of a Web app. I don't think it is a useful
> goal to seek to move everything to the browser side.


There are actually browser plugins that expose EXIF and similar image
metadata, see https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/search/?q=exif&cat=all&x=0&y=0
. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the same thing for video
and audio.

Cheers,
Silvia.

Received on Wednesday, 13 April 2011 11:55:24 UTC