[Bug 13276] Not allowing author or developer to have absolute control over media playback

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=13276

--- Comment #13 from Philip Jägenstedt <philipj@opera.com> 2011-07-18 13:08:35 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #9)
> (In reply to comment #8)
> > Is the problem that a user can seek in the video or pause it? If so, what ill
> > effects can come of that? When seeking, to the page it will just take a
> > longer/shorter time before the ended event is fired, which should not typically
> > be a problem. For playing/pausing, if the page assumed that it was in control,
> > it wouldn't listen to the play/pause events at all, so it would presumably be
> > just as if the network came to a halt.
> > 
> > Some details on "there may be a good reason" might help.
> 
> Seems comments 2 and 4 above.

So, "to allow playback options in the context menu when controls is not present
also adds additional complexity to applications that provide custom controls.
They not only have to listen for events triggered by their own custom controls,
but also to handle events triggered by the menu."

As per above, it doesn't seem like this would actually be a problem. If a
script assumes that it is the only thing in control of the video, then it won't
be listening to seek events and the change in currentTime will most likely go
unnoticed. Playing/pausing will appear mostly as if the browser had to stop for
buffering.

Can you provide some real-world example of pages/scripts that don't intend the
user to the play/pause/seek and that therefore makes assumptions that will
break the page/script if the user actually does?

If more pages start to use audio/video and try hard to not make the user be
able to interrupt it, then we're just going to add page-wide UI to pause or
mute all media elements on a page. Why would we ever want a page to be able to
override a user in these decisions?

(In reply to comment #10)
> And I'll ask in return: what was the technical reason for removing playback
> control for the media elements from the web page author/developer?

Do you mean why the controls attribute was omitted? Usually, because they look
different in all UIs and don't match the design of the embedding page. If some
page author thought it would also guarantee that the user couldn't pause their
video, they were wrong.

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Received on Monday, 18 July 2011 13:08:43 UTC