- From: Edward O'Connor <hober0@gmail.com>
- Date: Mon, 28 Dec 2009 15:44:50 -0800
- To: Jeremy Keith <jeremy@adactio.com>
- Cc: HTMLwg <public-html@w3.org>
> Is the absence of the autobuffer attribute an explicit request not to > pre-buffer? I'd rather it not be. I think it's important for the author to be able to say "hi browser, please do whatever is most appropriate given your platform / network connection / memory / etc., insofar as buffering is concerned." In fact, I suspect this to be the most common authoring case. Most authors would prefer it if, say, cell phone browsers defaulted to no-autobuffering, whereas they might prefer desktop browsers to behave differently. Given that, I'd prefer the default/lazy authoring behavior (not specifying the attribute at all) to have this meaning. Essentially, we have three things we'd like authors to be able to convey to the browser: 1. Do whatever the browser thinks best. 2. Please autobuffer. 3. Please *don't* autobuffer. And there are a few things we'd like to be able to say about whatever design we settle on: A. (1) above should be the default condition, so its syntax should be what most authors will do anyway (not provide attributes at all). B. Any new boolean attributes should behave like the other boolean attributes already present in HTML (presence means t and absense means nil). C. If at all possible, we should be able to use different values for the same attribute for (2) and (3). (Minting separate attributes for (2) and (3) means allowing authors to write nonsensical markup, and having to spec what HTML5 processors should do when they're both present. What does <video buffer nobuffer> mean?) There's a lot of tension between (B) and (C), so much so that I think autobuffer="" should probably become an enumerated attribute[1] instead of a boolean attribute. Something like the following: 1. Do whatever the browser thinks best. [no autobuffer attribute] 2. Please autobuffer. [autobuffer="on"] 3. Please *don't* autobuffer. [autobuffer="off"] Ted 1. http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/common-microsyntaxes.html#keywords-and-enumerated-attributes
Received on Monday, 28 December 2009 23:45:42 UTC