On Jan 2, 2010, at 8:07 PM, Robert O'Callahan wrote: > On Sun, Jan 3, 2010 at 3:42 PM, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com> > wrote: > In the absence of any explicit attributes for buffer control, a > likely good design would be to apply a heuristic. For example: if a > page contains only one <video> element, then buffer aggressively. If > it contains many, don't buffer any of them. Alternately, one could > look at whether a particular video has larger explicit dimensions or > appears in a more prominent place on the page. Since an unaware > author is most likely not to add any special attributes, it would be > nice to apply a heuristic like this when no special buffering- > related attribute is present. Let's call this case (A). > > I'm unconvinced a heuristic is needed. Shouldn't we wait and see if > authors actually fail to apply "autobuffer" when they should? If we add a way for page to hint that no buffering is needed, we can each act on our opinions as to whether a heuristic is needed, since you can treat lack of attribute the same as the "no buffer" hint. But if we don't add the third state, then either I can't add the heuristic that I think is best for overall user experience, or authors have no reliable way to opt out of buffering. It's true that, if you are right, we end up with a no-op attribute, if we add nobuffer. But in the meantime we could actually do the experiment of trying both ways. Personally, I think it's highly likely that many authors will omit autobuffer out of carelessness, and not as a signal of intent. It would have no visible effect other than performance, and the difference would be much less in the typical test environment where the author has a very fast pipe to his or her deployment server. In such circumstances, I don't see how we can possibly treat *lack* of an attribute as a strong indicator of author intent. It's much more likely to mean the author simply hasn't thought about the issue. Regards, Maciej
Received on Sunday, 3 January 2010 04:42:47 UTC