Re: media fragment URI use on web pages

On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 9:21 PM, Philip Jägenstedt <philipj@opera.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 28 Oct 2010 02:13:07 +0200, Silvia Pfeiffer
> <silviapfeiffer1@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi guys,
>>
>> I've been wondering about how we can use media fragment URIs on Web
>> page URLs such that the fragment is handed through to the correct
>> media element. Existing schemes - such as YouTube's scheme of e.g.
>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZhMoxXilwro#t=186 only work with a
>> single video on a page.
>>
>> It might be an idea to suggest something like:
>> http://example.com/page.html#video[0]&t=10,20
>>
>> Then it's possible to provide a URL with media fragments for multiple
>> videos on a page:
>> http://example.com/page.html#video[0]&t=10,20&video[1]&t=30,40 etc.
>>
>> or for all videos on the page:
>> http://example.com/page.html#videos&t=10,20
>>
>> It would be nice if something like this (or nicer - improved
>> suggestions welcome) becomes a scheme that everyone uses and that
>> therefore the browsers can support.
>>
>> It's a scheme on a Web page (.html) rather than on a media resource
>> (.ogv / .webm / .mp4) and as such not really something that this group
>> was chartered for. But I believe we could add a note that recommends
>> such use and would be a Web author recommendation, and that the HTML
>> WG could eventually pick up as a browser recommendation.
>
> While this would be very useful, it's not something that can be standardized
> in browsers. The URL page.html#t=1 already causes browsers to scroll to the
> element with id="t=1". Overloading this behavior would most likely break
> some pages. See
> <http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/history.html#scroll-to-fragid>
>
> This is quite unfortunate, as far as I can see the best we can hope for is
> page.html?t=1 with per-site server-side solutions or page.html#t=1 with
> per-site JavaScript solutions (those sites would have to make sure to not
> have id="t=1" on their pages, and live with not being able to use the
> fragment for its usual purpose). Perhaps there's room for standardization
> here, as long as it's clear that User Agents aren't involved.

You misunderstand. I didn't want to suggest it for browsers, but for
site developers. Over time, as people change their Websites to use
such structured fragment URIs, we may be able to bring it into the
browser, but I don't expect it to be before another 5-10 years. Some
sites already use this kind of markup (see YouTube for example). It
would be nice to recommend a common naming scheme for all sites. They
don't have to follow, but more is done today by convention than by
standardisation.

Seems we missed that discussion at the F2F. :-)

Cheers,
Silvia.

Received on Thursday, 4 November 2010 22:02:37 UTC