On Sat, 11 Jul 2009 21:15:47 +0200, Maciej Stachowiak <m...@apple.com>
wrote:
On Jul 11, 2009, at 7:56 AM, Ian Fette (イアンフェッティ) wrote:
2009/7/11 Robert O'Callahan <rob...@ocallahan.org>
On Sat, Jul 11, 2009 at 9:38 PM, Philip Jägenstedt
<phil...@opera.com> wrote:
Well I disagree of course, because having canPlayType("video/ogg")
mean anything else than "can I demux Ogg streams" is pointless.
So you want "canPlayType" to mean one thing when provided a type
without codecs, and another thing when provided a type with codecs.
I don't think that's a good idea.
Anyway, it's too late. If you care passionately about this you
should have reopened this discussion months ago, not now that two
browsers have just shipped support for the API in the spec.
Disagree -- the whole point of candidate rec (which the spec is
driving towards) is to find out how implementable the spec is -- not
just from the browser side, but from a web author side as well. If a
feature turns out to not be implementable / usable in practice,
that is certainly valid feedback at this stage.
(Not to say it wouldn't be better to have had this conversation
earlier, but I definitely don't think that the ship has sailed on
this, and in practice some things you only find out once it's
implemented and you can actually try using it.)
At this point, I think <video> should only be changed incompatibly if
it is discovered to be literally unimplementable (unlikely now that
it's been implemented twice) or unusable for its desired use cases,
and an incompatible break is the only fix. But I don't think the issue
at hand is that serious - we're just talking about potential
refinement. The design we have now for canPlayType is not my favorite,
but I can't really say it's broken.
Not that I except this discussion to go anywhere, but out of curiosity I
checked how Firefox/Safari/Chrome actually implement canPlayType:
http://wiki.whatwg.org/wiki/Video_type_parameters#Browser_Support
Firefox is conservative and honest (except maybe for "audio/wav;
codecs=0", what could you do with the RIFF DATA chunk?) Safari gets
maybe/probably backwards compared to what the spec suggests. Chrome seems
to ignore the codecs parameter, claiming "probably" even for bogus codecs.
Authors obviously can't trust the distinction between "maybe" and
"probably" to any extent.
--
Philip Jägenstedt
Core Developer
Opera Software
