Re: Systematic access to media/plugin metadata

On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 9:54 PM, Silvia Pfeiffer
<silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 13, 2011 at 8:49 PM, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi> wrote:
>> On Wed, 2011-04-13 at 12:01 +0200, Danny Ayers wrote:
>>> > As far as I can tell, the use cases you included called for browser UI
>>> > features--not for an API.
>>>
>>> I don't think so...the UI parts for directing someone to a hotel or
>>> alerting them to something in a photo could be handled by regular
>>> DOM/HTML, <canvas> or SVG. The only bit that can't easily be fulfilled
>>> right now is access to the metadata.
>>
>> If the scenario is that someone puts a image with metadata on a server
>> and without the author doing anything else, the browser can alert the
>> user about stuff, then it's about a built-in browser feature that
>> doesn't have expose anything to JS.
>>
>> If the scenario is that someone puts an image with metadata on a server
>> *and* supplies a JavaScript program that uses DOM/HTML, canvas or SVG to
>> alert the user about the metadata, the author controls both the image
>> and the alert mechanism, so the author might as well extract the
>> metadata on the server side (like e.g. Flickr does) and transfer the
>> extracted data to the browser using whatever existing means.
>>
>> The server is a notable part of a Web app. I don't think it is a useful
>> goal to seek to move everything to the browser side.
>
>
> There are actually browser plugins that expose EXIF and similar image
> metadata, see https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/search/?q=exif&cat=all&x=0&y=0
> . I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the same thing for video
> and audio.

Also, most browsers now have some sort of context menu for inspecting
an image "view image info" or similar. Metadata like this is often
displayed in such context menus. We could do the same for audio and
video to allow users to inspect it.

I'm not sure I can come up with a good idea for an application that
would need that information in JavaScript.

Silvia.

Received on Wednesday, 13 April 2011 12:01:26 UTC