[whatwg] <video> element error handling

On Wed, Mar 18, 2009 at 6:46 PM, Nathanael Ritz <nathanritz at gmail.com> wrote:
> That makes some sense. So the UA would handle missing codec problems like
> many handle missing plug-ins. Is that part of the spec already? From what I
> have gathered, it seemed that everyone was/is content with the UA just
> displaying nothing when the video couldn't be rendered even if it did
> support the <video> element.

it doesn't matter if it's part of the spec already.

what matters is that the alternatives are awful.

Half a year ago, Facebook once told users of my browser (microb) w/ a
broken version of flash to download another one from Adobe.
<https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3567> It turns out that our
version of flash was mislabeled (the history here was amusing, as our
version of flash was certified by Adobe, their test suite did not
cover the plugin's description).

That was fixed.

Some users (including myself, ironically, since i debugged and
provided a basic fix for this) still encountered this problem months
later and the error message of course suggests getting an update from
Adobe.... But adobe doesn't offer a newer version of flash for my
platform. (It turns out that if you upgrade the OS you can get a
version of flash which isn't mislabeled, but...)

Today, Facebook tells my users to download a newer version of flash
(there isn't such a thing in this case, and the information isn't even
useful for the technical people, we have no idea what it means).
<https://bugs.maemo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4206>

Historically, anyone who tries to write fallback content will fail because:
1. it won't be properly localized
2. it won't properly support the system OS/Arch
3. it won't properly handle the browser

> For me, I was personally planning on putting the <embed> element instead of
> text. So it would be (like my very first example), <video src=""><embed
> /></video>.

You can easily do this using JavaScript when you detect that the
browser doesn't support your content (or it's missing).

For the rest, there's the poster feature and other stuff.

> The plan here was to make the video available to the new iPhone 3.0 OS which
> supports the <video> element, and then the flash version of the same video
> would be available to those who had Flash installed but was using an older
> UA.

I'm sure that people will provide JS libraries and template systems
which will do this for you.

> I might even want to use "must"

forget about it. thanks.

Received on Wednesday, 18 March 2009 15:24:26 UTC