- From: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- Date: Tue, 5 Jun 2012 21:44:49 +0000 (UTC)
- To: Kit Grose <kit@iqmultimedia.com.au>
- Cc: "<whatwg@lists.whatwg.org>" <whatwg@lists.whatwg.org>, Francis Boumphrey <boumphreyfr@gmail.com>
On Fri, 13 Jan 2012, Kit Grose wrote: > On 13/01/2012, at 4:46 AM, Francis Boumphrey wrote: > > > > Firstly if I use a video with the src attribute > > > > e.g. <video src='myvideo.mp4' controls> > > > > and my user agent does not support the format, all I get (in my > > versions of Opera and Firefox) is a blank screen. No message (as I > > would get with <embed>) and as far as I can see there is no way for me > > as an author to know that the video is not being played so I cannot > > code a 'write around'. > > I brought up this same concern in Dec 2009 and Hixie seemed to concur: > > On 9/02/2010, Ian Hickson wrote: > > > > Indeed, if we can't get a common codec, the spec as written today is > > not a particularly good design. If we really can't solve this problem, > > then we'll have to introduce a declarative way of saying "if you can't > > play any of the videos, here's what I want you to do instead" -- but > > hopefully we won't have to go there. > > (see > http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2010-February/025028.html) > > I'd argue that while we did receive in WebM "a common codec" it does not > enjoy the sort of universal adoption required to be able to mandate its > support in the spec, so on that logic, I think establishing a > declarative fallback mechanism is probably required to prevent a > situation where you cannot write a robust HTML5 page with video and > without resorting to JS. I don't think it's time to give up yet, but maybe I'm overly optimistic... -- Ian Hickson U+1047E )\._.,--....,'``. fL http://ln.hixie.ch/ U+263A /, _.. \ _\ ;`._ ,. Things that are impossible just take longer. `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'
Received on Tuesday, 5 June 2012 21:45:23 UTC