Re: [mediaqueries4] Media queries for multichannel audio ?

On Thu, 21 Mar 2013 00:07:15 +0100, Mark Watson <watsonm@netflix.com>  
wrote:


> Tab suggests we need some way to declare the resolution, or channel  
> count, of the media to the UA, but that would move the responsibility  
> for deciding how to match media properties with physical properties from  
> the user to the UA

I guess you meant "from the author to the UA". Which I would say is a good  
thing. The author knows best about which types of media are available, but  
the UA (on behalf of the user) knows best about the rendering environment.

You said video only ever care about physical pixels, as you want to show  
it bigger on bigger screens, but I think it is not that simple. Video is  
not always full screen, so knowing the screen's number of pixel doesn't  
help you, you want the rendering area's number of pixels. And even then,  
it isn't that simple, as the video element may be scaled up or down using  
CSS transforms, or even rotated, possibly in 3D. Or maybe the user agent  
has a zooming in and out mechanism either for page navigation, or for tab  
switching.

No matter what is happening to the video rendering surface, the UA has to  
know about it. If we want a javascript based selecting system to be able  
to make an equally inteligent choice, all that information (and more: the  
timing of the animation if any is applied to the transform, network  
conditions...). Exposing all that through media queries in not possible.  
You could try crafting some javascript API independently, but I don't  
think this is an effective approach.

Whether you do it in markup or via scripts, describing the media to the UA  
and letting it pick the ideal variant seems a lot easier, so that's the  
direction I would look into.

  - Florian

Received on Saturday, 23 March 2013 13:53:06 UTC