[Bug 11984] Simplify <video> for implementors and authors by ignoring the Content-Type HTTP header

http://www.w3.org/Bugs/Public/show_bug.cgi?id=11984

--- Comment #27 from Philip Jägenstedt <philipj@opera.com> 2011-03-07 19:56:07 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #26)
> (In reply to comment #24)
> > A few of the things in
> > <http://www.w3.org/html/wg/wiki/ChangeProposals/NoVideoContentType#Negative_Effects>
> > are not solved by my new suggestion, so I'd consider not fixing these cons:
> > 
> > * The incentive for supporting many different equivalent MIME types in
> > canPlayType and <source type> is removed, as they come only from legacy
> > Content-Type issues. 
> > 
> > * Some legacy MIME types, such as audio/x-pn-wav, can likely be removed from
> > implementations of canPlayType.
> > 
> > This is damage we'll have to live with unless we always sniff, it might be OK
> > if implementors exercise some contraint in which MIME types they add support
> > for. WAVE might be a lost case, though.
> 
> I didn't really understand these two points. I'm sure I'm just missing some
> background info. Please could you elaborate?

It relates to this point from "Issues for Implementors":

* In order to be compatible with what is sent in Content-Type, implementations
must support several synonymous MIME types. This is exposed via canPlayType,
where there was no legacy to consider originally, creating unnecessary room for
incompatibilities. For example, Firefox supports 4 different MIME types for
WAVE, Opera supports 3 and Chrome supports 2. (source:
<http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Video_type_parameters#Browser_Support>)

If Content-Type was always ignored, this pollution of canPlayType would not
happen. Actually, we could perhaps fix it in my new proposal as well by adding
this point:

* Content-Type is normalized to allow for synonyms like audio/wave and
audio/wav that are necessary for compat, but via canPlayType only the canonical
form is exposed, so only one would return "maybe"/"probably".

I don't think it's actually worth the complexity though, I just consider it a
con relative to ignoring Content-Type.

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Received on Monday, 7 March 2011 19:56:13 UTC