Re: Constraints 2014 new slides

I'm assuming that this rather than your mailing list post is now the
most up to date version of your proposal?

I can't make the call today, so written comments below:

At a high level, I'm trying to understand the motivation for this change.
Any significant revision to the constraints syntax comes with a really
large cost for application programmers, who will have to somehow
have to figure out which constraints syntax to offer. These syntaxes
appear to be incompatible in the sense that if you were to supply a
new-style syntax to an old implementation, it would likely choke and vice
versa.
This isn't to say we should never change anything, but as far as I can tell
the major benefit of this is better WebIDL conformance, which seems like
something that's primarily of interest to standards people and (maybe) Web
browser implementors. To the extent to which that's the benefit, it seems
like we should instead consider other alternatives for how to document the
existing syntax. I might feel differently if this design were compatible.
Conversely, if we are going to break the world, we should get more value
than this proposal appears provides.


WRT to the details:
As I mentioned in a previous message, this doesn't seem to be
generalizable to talk about multiple instances of audio and video.
That seems like clearly something one would want. That seems
like something one could achieve by treating the argument
to gUM as a list of tracks one wants, each of which contains
constraints, rather than a dictionary.

I share Cullen's concern about not being able to list a set of
devices in order of preference. This is basic functionality.

The actual algorithm for processing optional constraints seems
pretty complicated. At the point where this is an unordered wish
list, why not just let the browser evaluate the preferences any
way it pleases?


In summary, I oppose adopting this proposal at this time. I'm not a big
fan of the current syntax, but if we're going to change a bunch of stuff
we should take a serious look at what we are optimizing for and
then build something that matches that.

-Ekr



















On Wed, Mar 26, 2014 at 5:23 PM, Jan-Ivar Bruaroey <jib@mozilla.com> wrote:

> I tried Justin's changes and I like it!
>
> So I think I'll present this slide-deck instead.
>
> .: Jan-Ivar :.
>
> On 3/26/14 12:35 PM, Jan-Ivar Bruaroey wrote:
>
>> Here are my slides for tomorrow's call.
>>
>> Please bear in mind that they don't reflect Justin's reasonable
>> suggestion to divide things explicitly into video and audio.
>>
>> I am totally open to such renaming, but it doesn't functionally impact my
>> presentation, so I think I'll present it as I have it, and hopefully we can
>> discuss names at the end (I may come with a backup slide-deck).
>>
>> I hope that works for everybody.
>>
>> .: Jan-Ivar :
>>
>
>