Re: Public feedback on HTML5 video

> 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