Re: Projection media type in fullscreen browser mode

On Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 7:00 PM, fantasai<fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net> wrote:
> Opera's fullscreen mode is different from the others in that it is
> a paged medium and is intended for use with a hookup to projectors.
> Opera doesn't automatically paginate to the screen size, but if you
> force a page break this paginates the document and can be used to
> create slide shows. (See the OperaShow documentation.)
>
> It's a very useful mode; it would be nice if other browsers also
> supported it. It would make things like S5 a lot less of a JS/CSS
> mess.

The mode sounds useful, but I don't think treating all use of
full-screen as media type projection is a good solution here.  If you
want a plain old screen stylesheet, and aren't providing a separate
projection stylesheet -- i.e., you're 99.97% of websites out there --
you would want full-screen mode to render exactly like screen.
Therefore screen stylesheets need to apply in full-screen mode, in the
overwhelming majority of cases.  Having projection apply to
full-screen mode just means that "screen" alone is useless for almost
all authors, and everyone needs to specify "screen,projection".  It's
the tiny minority who want to support projections who should have to
opt-in somehow, not everyone else who has to opt out to not have their
site break.

This feature really seems orthogonal to media queries to me.  It
should be triggered by the author, not the user.  Only the author
knows if he wants to use his web page as a slideshow.  The user
shouldn't trigger it by using a mode that at least I (and apparently
the majority of browser developers) would expect to do nothing but
give more space to the page's content.

Why couldn't the spec allow authors to explicitly make continuous
media paged somehow?  (At least handheld/screen/tv.  Obviously it
makes no sense to page, e.g., speech.)  For instance, UAs could be
required to make the media paged if @page rules are found.  Or a new
rule could be invented to trigger this.  Then if you want to create a
slideshow, you can do that in an interoperable way.  If you just want
to create a normal web page, you should be able to provide screen
stylesheets and expect them to apply to all users using a normal
display.

Received on Tuesday, 18 August 2009 00:41:24 UTC