[whatwg] Proposal: User-Cacheable Media

Hello Everyone!

I would like to propose what I think would be a new feature for HTML AV
playback. Thanks to the great work everyone on this list has done, web
authors now have several solid tools for caching webpages and their
content for offline access. I think what is missing today is the ability
for users to optionally select embedded web content to cache offline from
within their browser.

Suppose we have a webpage that has a 150 MB video embedded in it using the
standard HTML <video> tag.

As a user/consumer of the web, I’d like to be able to browse to this page
while on WIFI/Ethernet, click or tap a button included in the default
browser controls to cache the video content, leave the page open and
continue viewing the video content later when I might not have
WIFI/Ethernet/Cellular access at all.
Perhaps I have an internet connection, but the connection is so poor that
attempting to download up to 150 MB of video content is a futile effort. I
could reasonably browse to the page again, and if the embedded video media
is cached, my browser is smart enough to know that it does not need to be
downloaded again. It can pull it from it’s local cache for playback.
Perhaps I’m on a rickety old airplane without in-flight WIFI service, and
I have no internet connection. The page was left open in a browser tab,
and the entire video was cached earlier using a WIFI/Ethernet connection.
I am able to switch to that tab and finish viewing the video content.
My browser is smart enough to keep this content cached for up to seven
days (…fourteen ...thirty days?) after the last time I viewed it. After
which period, it will be automatically trimmed away so that I do not have
to actively remember clear these files myself.
As an author of web content, I’d like to be able to give my audience the
choice to cache AV content on this webpage so that they can view it while
offline. I'd like to do this using standard HTML <audio> and <video>
playback facilities.

I have only been lurking in this listserv since 2013, so I hope I am not
being redundant or proposing something that has already been discussed and
debated about before that. There is clearly a ton of planning and
discussion that’d have to happen to make this work, but those are the main
use cases I have in mind.


I'd appreciate your feedback. Thanks!

Ben

Received on Friday, 1 July 2016 03:44:23 UTC