Re: Survey ready on Media Multitrack API proposal

On Mar 3, 2010, at 12:34 PM, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:

> On Thu, Mar 4, 2010 at 12:26 AM, Philip Jägenstedt <philipj@opera.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, 03 Mar 2010 21:11:32 +0800, Silvia Pfeiffer <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>> It believe it already is a free-form string, but with some default
>>> roles defined - those roles that made sense. We had a discussion about
>>> this at the subgroup teleconf, btw, and agreed that it makes sense to
>>> pre-define a set of roles so as to make the obvious roles
>>> interoperable. Do you disagree with that proposal?
>> 
>> What I'm saying is that whatever is in the media resource gets exposed as is
>> in the API, i.e. the UA makes no attempt to map things to any of the
>> predefined values. But this only works if all interesting container formats
>> already have something like role and the identifiers used are the same as
>> the ones we want in HTML5.
> 
> I think just displaying whatever value the container has defeats the
> purpose of a standard API. It will result e.g. in several different
> means of identifying "caption" - some would have "CC" others "cap"
> others "caption" and there are certainly many other ways of specifying
> it.
> 
> I think the purpose here is to expose to the Web developer a standard
> means of identifying what is in the file. This mapping should be done
> by the media subsystem that knows both the media file format and the
> HTML standard and can provide for the mapping. It should only expose
> directly what the file format stores if it doesn't understand the
> name. Otherwise the task of mapping is left to the Web developer and
> they would need to develop it for all possible media formats and all
> possible naming schemes in order to get to a standard naming.
> 
> I think the media subsystem should do a best effort and then leave the
> Web developer to sort out the hard problems.
> 
  I agree.

eric