removing loop attribute

Hi all,

I was tasked with registering a bug on the HTML spec to remove the
loop attribute from media elements. However, while writing it up, I
decided I didn't really find it worth fighting for any more. I can
live with it just working for the really simple case and not do
anything sensible for media fragments or grouped multitrack resources,
because in those latter cases you would not use loop anyway and write
it in JavaScript.

If somebody is keen enough to fight to remove the attribute, here's
the rationale that I wrote. Feel free to re-use it.

Cheers,
Silvia.

Bug for HTML spec:

"Remove loop attribute from media elements"

The loop attribute on the audio and video elements is a difficult
attribute to deal with.

In bug 12426 it became clear that when a Media Fragment URIs is used
as a media resource, the meaning of looping becomes unclear.

In bug 12545 it became clear that when we are dealing with grouped
multitrack resources, the meaning of looping is again unclear.

The loop attribute can be replaced with a simple JavaScript call where
onended sets the video.currentTime to 0 (or calls video.play()).
Therefore, in bug 12426 it was contemplated to remove the loop
attribute from the spec.

Philip from Opera stated: "In principle I would be fine with this. The
only benefit of loop is that it can in theory be gapless, but I would
really rather have a solution where one can achieve gapless playback
between different resources rather than just within a single one. With
adaptive streaming the low-level plumbing to be able to do that will
have to exist anyway."

And further:
"However, there are games that use looping audio for background music,
so I also don't really mind keeping loop for the simple cases and just
making it not work for the complex cases."

A situation where the attribute works for some versions of video/audio
and not for others is unsatisfactory and will lead to confusion by Web
developers and even by users where the loop functionality is exposed
in the video controls or context menu.

On top of all this, the loop attribute is not currently implemented in
Firefox and there are no immediate plans of implementing it.

Seeing as seeking is so simple in JavaScript, the confusion around the
loop attribute can be avoided by removing it.

Received on Wednesday, 6 July 2011 10:17:55 UTC