On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 9:33 AM, David Chambers <[email protected]> wrote: > My question is, has anyone given thought to an appropriate syntax for video > in Markdown? We're a long way (five years, at least) from being at the point > where `<video src="/path/to/video"></video>` will be sufficient to get the > job done, so this probably isn't something that Markdown itself will include > for quite some time. I'm nonetheless interested to hear others' thoughts as > to what an appropriate syntax might be.
Well until we are at that point, I don't think there is anything we can practically do. Consider this html5 markup which you would presumably be generating (taken from http://diveintohtml5.org/video.html): <video width="320" height="240" controls> <source src="pr6.mp4" type='video/mp4; codecs="avc1.42E01E, mp4a.40.2"'> <source src="pr6.webm" type='video/webm; codecs="vp8, vorbis"'> <source src="pr6.ogv" type='video/ogg; codecs="theora, vorbis"'> </video> Until all those codec issues you mention are resolved, many people may need to list multiple source paths (as well as the mime type and codecs for each) for one video. The width and height should also be listed, even for a single source. How do you list all that in a simple markdown syntax. Seems to me html5's syntax does as good a job as any. True, this doesn't work for flash. That still requires and whole other <object> tag as a sibling of the <source> tags - which is a whole other mess I'll ignore. True, flash aside, a certain site may use a specific url scheme, only offer a certain subset of codeces and offer all videos at a set size; which could then be passed into your script as user definable options. But, do you really want to maintain that when new and different (better?) codeces come along with new requirements? And what about videos hosted off site that follow different url schemes, offer different codeces and different sizes? On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 11:34 AM, Vinay Augustine <[email protected]> wrote: > What about a URI-like handler? > >  That works if the media is hosted locally (and codeces, size etc has been resolved in the code), but what about: `, but do you really want to update your code to support every new video host that comes along? Or would you provide some api by which the user could define his own? I don't know about you, but every time I link to some new video host from my blog, I don't want to have to update my code (even if I wrote it all myself) so markdown knows about the new site. The fact is, when I go back up and reread this message and get to the source <video> tag, all I see is `<video ` and think to myself, "oh, this is a video which gets inserted in the document" and I skip to the next block. It doesn't really make reading the document any more painful or difficult. And when writing, well, we need to include all that metadata anyway. To me this doesn't really solve any problems - it just shifts the problem to the code maintainer - who may or may not know about the need to support some new host/codec/url scheme/size/whatever else hasn't been thought of. Perhaps, as you say David, it could exist as a third party package, much like smartypants does. Run your source text through markdown, then run it through your video converter and then through smartypants and then through an html sanitizer so on and so forth. But I can't imagine I'll ever be using it. When (if?) the day comes where `<video src="/path/to/video"></video>` will be sufficient to get the job done, I'll probably just use that. And actually, if you do implement a post-processor of some kind, why not just make that the syntax? Markdown should see that as raw html and pass it through unaltered. If that day ever does come, just remove your post-processor and be done with it. My (perhaps more than) $0.02. -- ---- \X/ /-\ `/ |_ /-\ |\| Waylan Limberg _______________________________________________ Markdown-Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://six.pairlist.net/mailman/listinfo/markdown-discuss
