[mediacapture-screen-share] Either fully support or remove audio capture entirely: "MAY" re audio capture is ambiguous (#140)

guest271314 has just created a new issue for https://github.com/w3c/mediacapture-screen-share:

== Either fully support or remove audio capture entirely: "MAY" re audio capture is ambiguous ==
This entire paragraph 

> In the case of audio, the user agent MAY present the end-user with audio sources to share. Which choices are available to choose from is up to the user agent, and the audio source(s) are not necessarily the same as the video source(s). An audio source may be a particular application, window, browser, the entire system audio or any combination thereof. Unlike mediadevices.getUserMedia() with regards to audio+video, the user agent is allowed not to return audio even if the audio constraint is present. If the user agent knows no audio will be shared for the lifetime of the stream it _MUST NOT_ include an audio track in the resulting stream. The user agent _MAY_ accept a request for audio and video by only returning a video track in the resulting stream, or it _MAY_ accept the request by returning both an audio track and a video track in the resulting stream. The user agent _MUST_ reject audio-only requests.

is ambiguous, capable of producing confusion for both implementers and fron-end users, see https://github.com/w3c/mediacapture-screen-share/issues/100.

For *nix users with PulseAudio installed the platform supports system wide audio capture at device named "Monitor of <device>", see https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1032815.

Right now, *nix users with PulseAudio installed have the technical capability to capture system-wide audio, yet due to lack of clear and affirmative language in the specification implementers are obviously not encouraged or compelled to make sure that audio capture is  implemented to conform with the specification: no mandatory language tells them to do so. 

Either change the language to state the user agent MUST capture audio when the constraint is passed where supported at the architecture and platform; or, if audio capture is really  not intended for this API, remove all audio language from the specification completely.


Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/mediacapture-screen-share/issues/140 using your GitHub account

Received on Saturday, 9 May 2020 16:25:27 UTC