RE: Dropping MediaController in HTML5.1?

Very clear. Thanks a bunch!

From: Chris Wilson [mailto:cwilso@google.com]
Sent: Wednesday, March 4, 2015 12:54 PM
To: Travis Leithead; Aaron Colwell; Andrew Scherkus; Philip Jägenstedt
Cc: Philippe Le Hegaret; public-html@w3.org; public-html-a11y@w3.org
Subject: Re: Dropping MediaController in HTML5.1?

If you look at the head of that Intent to Unship mail, it's pretty clear about the rationale:

Put MediaController behind an experimental runtime flag until the implementation correctly integrates with the media engine.
...
MediaController was implemented in http://trac.webkit.org/changeset/100159 and is currently supported in WebKit and Chromium browsers. ... Unfortunately, the implementation does not integrate with the media engine, which means that the slaved media elements are not actually kept in sync. Without this integration the API is little more than a "C++ polyfill." Had the feature not already been shipped, I think it would be a bad idea to ship it in its current state, since without a full implementation it's hard to judge what the true complexity of the feature is.
...
MediaController is very rarely used and not supported in Firefox or IE, so the risk seems very low. [I don't know if this is still true.  -cwilso]
...
Alternative implementation suggestion for web developers
In short, do whatever you do to support Firefox and IE. Simply seeking two media elements (while paused) and playing them at the same time should give roughly the same result as when using Blink's current MediaController implementation.

So, in short - we don't have a good implementation, and we think we should have a good implementation before shipping.

+Andrew, +Aaron, +Philip.

On Wed, Mar 4, 2015 at 12:22 PM, Travis Leithead <travis.leithead@microsoft.com<mailto:travis.leithead@microsoft.com>> wrote:
Can anyone from Google comment about this decision to un-support it? Now I'm curious...

-----Original Message-----
From: Philippe Le Hegaret [mailto:plh@w3.org<mailto:plh@w3.org>]
Sent: Wednesday, March 4, 2015 7:32 AM
To: public-html@w3.org<mailto:public-html@w3.org>
Cc: public-html-a11y@w3.org<mailto:public-html-a11y@w3.org>
Subject: Dropping MediaController in HTML5.1?

Blink is unshipping the MediaController by default [1]. It is now back behind their " Enable experimental Web Platform features".

MediaController is part of HTML 5.0 but, due to an oversight, it was never properly tested.

I believe we should consider whether we want to keep for HTML 5.1. If we'd like to, then we'll need further imho.

Philippe

[1]
https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink-dev/MVcoNSPs1UQ