Re: Public feedback on HTML5 video

On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 10:47 AM, Gavin Carothers <gavin@carothers.name> wrote:
> Summary:
>
> "This attribute may be ignored altogether" should be removed from the spec.
>
> Summarized Rationale:
>
> Avoid downloading video on pay per megabyte connections, and avoid
> extra bandwidth from the publisher on video that won't be played.

Clearly UAs should not blindly autobuffer all video and audio on a
page even if it's not requested by the page author.  WebKit's current
behavior is simply due to an incomplete implementation, only to be
expected in these early days.  Same as how it doesn't support
fullscreen video yet.  All this is obvious, so no spec change is
needed.

On Tue, Dec 22, 2009 at 11:32 AM, Kornel <kornel@geekhood.net> wrote:
> I think the spec should say that browsers may ignore presence of autobuffer
> attribute, but must not autobuffer (from remote servers?) if attribute is
> not present.

I don't think this is a good idea.  UAs should be free to come up with
heuristics that improve performance and user experience.
Autobuffering is sometimes a good idea and sometimes not, depending on
the circumstances, and the author will not always be in a better
position than the UA to know which case is which.  This is not an
interoperability issue, so there's no need for the spec to mandate
behavior here unless there's a demonstrated persistent problem.  Which
there's not, since WebKit recognizes the problem and will fix it.

Received on Tuesday, 22 December 2009 16:38:20 UTC