[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 #19 from Philip Jägenstedt <philipj@opera.com> 2011-07-18 14:10:39 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #14)
> Why would the HTML5 specification override the web page author and developer's
> wishes? They don't matter? Are web developers an encumbrance to be worked
> around?

If we don't give users the ultimate control over if/when video and audio plays,
they'll switch to a browser which does. If the spec tried to forbid
implementors from doing this, then it will just be ignored.

> We're forcing developers into using kludges because we're not giving developers
> options to completely control the media elements. 

All cases of disabling the context menu that I'm aware of have been to make it
harder to download the resource, not because the script was unable to deal with
play/pause from scripts. Which real-word sites are using "kludges" because of
the pause/play/seek problem?

> > (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.
> 
> No, why was it decided that web developers cannot have complete control over
> the media element's playback? What was the technical reason to remove such
> control from the web developer?

It wasn't removed, it was never there. It's really the same situation with user
style sheets, extensions, ad blockers, pop-up blockers, click-to-play plugins,
etc. Sometimes users use these to override authors. Sometimes that breaks
pages. The best way to avoid that happening is to not do things that users will
want to override.

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Received on Monday, 18 July 2011 14:10:44 UTC