Re: Public feedback on HTML5 video

On Wed, Dec 30, 2009 at 3:29 AM, Boris Zbarsky <bzbarsky@mit.edu> wrote:
> On 12/29/09 9:21 AM, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
>>>
>>> It just seems to me that any sane browser would conserve bandwidth if it
>>> knows how to, allowing the author to ask for that is a little bit like
>>> <script slowdown="no">.
>>
>> I would say that John Gruber's discovery has contradicted this statement.
>
> How so?  If I understood Maciej correctly, Safari would like to conserve
> bandwidth here, but just doesn't quite know how to yet given its use of
> quicktime.  Firefox does as good a job of conserving bandwidth as it knows
> how to, if @autobuffer is missing.  What exactly did John discover that
> contradicts the above statement?

Since not adding autobuffer means the browser can do what it wants to,
Safari/Webkit's implementation is standard conformant even though it
always autobuffers. If we expect browsers not to autobuffer, we have
to write that into the spec and make it non-conformant if it does
autobuffer. From what I understood, it is a bug in Safari and they
want to work on it. But right now it's not a bug, since it's standard
conformant.


> Note that the "if it knows how to" part of that statement is key, since
> autobuffer="no" is useless if the browser just doesn't have a way to not
> autobuffer.

>From what I understood "if it knows how to" is not the problem - it's
not what the standard says. The standard basically says: if you don't
want to, you don't have to - no matter if it's technically possible or
not. This is a big difference.


>> Also, if we really are asking for no autobuffering when the attribute
>> is not present, then this has to be stated in the HTML5 standard.
>
> _That_ I agree with.

:-)

Cheers,
Silvia.

Received on Wednesday, 30 December 2009 02:39:20 UTC