Re: Projection media type in fullscreen browser mode

On 8/18/09 7:11 AM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 5:17 AM, Øyvind Stenhaug<oyvinds@opera.com>  wrote:
>> To clarify, if the projection media type is used anywhere it will render to
>> that media type and ignore "screen". If there is nothing projection-specific
>> it will render to "screen" media.
>
> Then Opera is deciding its media type partly based on the markup
> provided by the author?  That's not how I expect media types to work
> -- they're meant to query what sort of device is being used, not
> return information about the current page's markup.
>
> Pragmatically, for web applications that are meant to be distributed
> to and used by third parties, this behavior is impossible to control.
> I can't know if the administrator of the site has added a @media
> projection rule somewhere in a custom stylesheet.

Not to beat up on poor Opera... ;) but for MediaWiki & Wikipedia we've 
encountered the same issue previously with Opera's "small-screen mode" 
and the "handheld" media type. Handheld is a messier world, though, and 
I think we've got an easier case to ponder on for the fullscreen. :)


In the modern web, it seems to me that most "web pages" aren't the 
manually-crafted work of an individual designer, but are generated via 
some sort of CMS -- frameworks, blogs, wikis, forums, social networking 
sites etc hosting plugins, apps, and themes from multiple sources...

....and *every* step along that chain is subject to cut-and-paste 
development.

The use of "screen,projection" in the wild creates an arms race where we 
*have* to use "screen,projection" because if we don't, someone else will 
and the combined styles will break in Opera.

IMO this is not how media types are meant to be used per the specs; the 
behavior is difficult to predict for both authors and users...


As noted previously in the thread, a paged "projection" mode *can* be 
useful in specific cases -- slideshow-style presentations being an 
obvious use case.

A much more reliable way to let authors activate this mode might be to 
use a meta tag indicating support, similar to the way Mobile Safari 
accepts viewport settings:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=320; user-scalable=false" />

Something like this perhaps:

<meta name="fullscreen-mode" content="projection" />

Without this tag present, all user-agents could continue to treat 
fullscreen as the expected "screen" type. With it present, supporting 
agents could switch in their paged projection mode -- whether or not 
there are any "projection" style rules specified.

-- brion vibber (brion @ wikimedia.org)
CTO, Wikimedia Foundation
San Francisco

Received on Thursday, 20 August 2009 15:32:57 UTC