Re: [whatwg] Proposal: User-Cacheable Media

On Fri, Jul 1, 2016 at 1:43 PM, <ben@smashingfiasco.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

Sounds like it is something ServiceWorker already covers.

- Xidorn

Received on Friday, 1 July 2016 05:12:20 UTC