Re: acceptable fallbacks [was: Re: Is longdesc a good solution? ...]

On Sep 11, 2008, at 05:00, Jim Jewett wrote:

> On Wed, Sep 10, 2008 at 3:37 AM, Henri Sivonen <hsivonen@iki.fi>  
> wrote:
>
>> I put the "Please upgrade" stuff in there to emphasize that the  
>> content of
>> the <video> element is not accessibility fallback but legacy browser
>> fallback. Per spec, the text about upgrading is not rendered in
>> <video>-supporting browser regardless of user's disability.
>
> My browser is perfectly capable of running audio and (through  
> plugins) video.
>
> I choose to turn them off most of the time.  I will make that same
> choice when they are "video" rather than "embed" or "object".
>
> Are you saying that I should stop getting those annoying upgrade
> pages, or that I should stop getting any warning at all of missed
> content?


I don't understand your motivation for wanting to turn video off, so  
it's hard to suggest a solution. The reasons why I want to turn some  
video-related stuff off by default isn't related to videoness but to  
pluginness (event loop spinning stuff on Mac; security holes in binary  
blobs).

It seems to me that if a <video>-supporting browser allowed the user  
to turn it off the way some browsers allow users to turn images off  
(mainly for legacy network technology considerations), the browser  
still shouldn't show the fallback meant for legacy browsers but should  
instead show a placeholder that can be clicked to unblock that  
particular video (much like the Flash Block Firefox extension allows  
you to click to unblock instead of pretending that Flash doesn't exist).

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Thursday, 11 September 2008 07:19:20 UTC