Re: minutes of 2010-09-08 teleconference

On 10 sep 2010, at 13:01, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:

> It may actually be a good thing to propose spec text for the HTML spec, because it will then make it a necessity for the browser vendors to implement support and they understand what is actually asked of them.

My angle would be the following (but note that I'm now pretending I'm an HTML/scripting guy).
There are two things HTML could do with media fragments: (a) display something reasonable, (b) pass the fragment parameter on to the DOM, so a script can do something more elaborate. (a) is the most sensible default. Whatever they display is actually not all that important, as webpage/app designers should be able to override it.

So I would suggest that they make the parameters of the MF url available to scripting, as attributes on the HTMLMediaElement interface. This enables scripts to access the MF data without duplicating the URL-parser.

By default, the browser would render only the MF-addressed part of the media. For convenience, they should render a time-based MF in context (i.e. putting in- and out-point at the beginning and end specified by the MF) and spatial MF out-of-context (i.e. cropping to the requested rectangle). However, scripts or webpages need a way to override this behavior. One possibility is to specify (a) when the HTMLMediaElement attributes are filled in and (b) when they are interpreted by the renderer, with the script having a chance to fiddle the MF parameters in between. Something like "loadstart" event seems like an option: if the browser first parses the URL and MF and puts the info in the DOM attributes, then raises "loadstart", then uses the parameters from the attributes this sequence gives a script a chance to override the default treatment of the MF. But another option would be to add an HTML-attribute (like interpretMediaFragment="false") or CSS styling attribute to forestall the default behavior.
--
Jack Jansen, <Jack.Jansen@cwi.nl>, http://www.cwi.nl/~jack
If I can't dance I don't want to be part of your revolution -- Emma Goldman

Received on Saturday, 11 September 2010 20:43:25 UTC