Maciej Stachowiak wrote:
On Apr 4, 2007, at 7:31 PM, Vladimir Vukicevic wrote:
1. 'media-loop-count' is an awkward name, especially with "The default
value of 1 means the item will play through once but will not loop."
We went through this with APNG, and ended up renaming that member. I
would suggest 'media-play-count' instead -- that way there is no
ambiguity with what the number means.
We considered 'media-repeat-count' instead of 'media-loop-count', but
that turned out to be more confusing. We really wanted all the
looping-related properties to have consistent naming, and I don't think
'play' would work in the other places mentioned.
The problem is that 'media-loop-count' with a value of 1, as defined,
doesn't have anything to do with looping... play-count is much more
descriptive of its actual purpose, IMO, despite not containing 'loop' in
the name. The others should definitely stay "loop-", though.
2. The descriptions for 'media-loop-start-time' and 'media-loop-end-
time' don't match; start-time says "sets the time at which the media
item begins playing after looping", and end-time says "sets the time
at which the media item loops for the second and subsequent repetitions".
I would suggest that start-time says "sets the time index at which the
media item starts playing for the second and subsequent repetitions",
and that end-time says "sets the time index at which the media item
ends playing for the second and subsequent repetitions." The language
for end-time is still a little awkward, since "ends playing" could
imply that it simply stops playing (and does not loop), but it's
clearer than before.
I think the language might have ended up actually defining it wrong. The
intent of 'media-loop-end-time' is that this is the point where you end
where repeating, but on the last iteration you go all the way to
'media-end-time'. So if 'media-loop-count' has a value of 3, the three
repetitions would go as follows:
[...]
Hmmm. I see how that would be useful, ok. So if I just wanted to loop
the first 5 seconds of a video clip, I would just set media-start-time
to 0s and media-end-time to 5s, and the count to infinite, right?
Clarifying this (perhaps with some examples) would be good.
3. 'media-timing' I would get rid of completely; while a shorthand
would be useful, I don't think that media-timing as specified really
works. Shorthands for properties such as 'background' are
understandable on their own; 'media-timing: playing 0s -0.5s 2 2s -4s
1' is very opaque. If it's still desirable, I would remove the
setting of start/end times and change the volume shorthand to only
accept the symbolic names; e.g. 'media-timing: playing high 4;'... but
I think that removing the shorthand entirely would be preferable.
I'll reply in more detail about media-timing in a later message.
Sounds good.
- Vlad
