At 16:06 -0800 29/01/08, Charles wrote:
James,
Since browsers are free to implement native <video> support with a
pluggable backend...
I understand, but something makes me think that this problem won't get
solved when developers are just free to solve it. (This isn't a criticism
of browser developers, BTW. There's no incentive to fix anything but the
formats they care about.)
Just to focus on one popular way of putting video on the web, Apple won't be
supporting Flash video* and Adobe won't again package Flash as a QuickTime
media type.
Are you looking for a way for plugins, rather than the browser
itself, to handle <video>?
Yes, with the brower handling handles precendence and event routing, etc.
But that's roughly what the cascading source elements do.
say you have 85% of your hits from two browser vendors, A and B, each
of whom has a specific optional format they support that you think is
better than the mandated one. You write
<video...>
<source vendorA...>
<source vendorB...>
<source mandatedDefault...>
</video>
and the rest of your page gets a uniform interface no matter what
browser is in effect. Indeed, if you later decide to support
vendorC's format, you can insert that without changing anything else
-- the rest of the HTML, the scripts, event handling, nothing. Seems
like a big advantage to me. And if the mandated format is good
enough, you have (we intend) 100% coverage from that, also. You get
real integration with the rest of HTML and CSS etc. These all seem
like pretty strong advantages to me.
And, in addition, nothing stops a vendor from having plug-ins at the
browser, framework, or codec level, to offer further flexibility.
What am I missing that you don't like?
--
David Singer
Apple/QuickTime
