Re: Public feedback on HTML5 video

On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 8:51 PM, Anne van Kesteren <annevk@opera.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 31 Dec 2009 10:44:00 +0100, Silvia Pfeiffer
> <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On Thu, Dec 31, 2009 at 4:17 AM, Tab Atkins Jr. <jackalmage@gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>> I think I'd like to see video durations and such for all videos, even
>>> if they're not autobuffered.  If you *really* don't want *anything*
>>> video-related to download, the best thing to do is simply not put a
>>> video in the page.  Just use a thumbnail with a link to the video,
>>> possible with js to replace the thumbnail with a <video> element for
>>> quicker turnaround (this has already been explored in this thread).
>>
>> Yes, a js workaround is possible. But when a feature can be added in
>> such a simple way rather than having to do a js workaround, why not do
>> it? Isn't HTML5 about avoiding many of the js workarounds that ppl had
>> to deal with in HTML4? Are we just going to force ppl to make
>> workarounds for such simple things for the new HTML5 elements again?
>
> The reason not to add it would be the same reason we do not add hundreds of
> other seemingly trivial features, they make matters more complex.

I agree with the general idea behind this. Not initialising a video
doesn't fall in this category though: it is actually simple and not
complex. However, this is going off on a slight tangent to the
original discussion. It's just something that I raised as a
possibility to take advantage of the three states.

> Is it a
> really common use case not to want any initialization at all for the video?

I believe so. Every web page that has more than maybe 3 videos
"embedded" - and that is video search results pages, video archive
listings and similar things - will need to stop their videos from
taking up unwanted bandwidth. This is a really common use - and also
one that John Gruber's blog post mentioned.

> Not having the element/link in the page does seem like a good solution to
> that problem, to prevent plugins, search engines, etc. to take hold of it.

But it will only work in js enabled browsers. For a common use case
such as video search and video listings, this is quite something to
ask, IMHO.

Cheers,
Silvia.
(and: Happy New Year! :-)

Received on Thursday, 31 December 2009 11:16:10 UTC