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First of all I think we should use <a rel="embed" href="uri-ref"> instead of
<source>. I'm not aware of previous proposals of that on this list. Feel free
to provide links if it's already been proposed.
Second, all the responses I've seen so far have been along the lines of "it's
the HTML5 way" (implying it's more of an XHTML 1 way, or [insert unfashionable
tech here] way) or that video is so important that it deserves first-class
treatment, and for the sake of completeness <audio> has to be included as well
(though interactive content, text and 3D models don't deserve to be
"first-class").
Isn't interactive content not important enaugh? What about text? What if one
want's to link to interactive maps? s...@src? <a class="embed"..> with .embed
{content: url(attr(href)) }? AFAIK CSS doesn't support it, and if it does <a
rel="embed"..> could be used as well, even without explicit browser support.
Also someone wrote that one should use <object> for media-types that aren't
supported in HTML yet. If you insist on keeping <video> and <audio>, think of
this as a way for second-class media-types WHATWG hasn't approved/haven't been
implemented to use some of the features of <video> and <audio>.
It's possible to specify the media type with attributes like @media for media
queries and @type for the type of specific resources. That way media queries
and MIME media types like audio, video, model and text can be reused, and all
types IANA might add in the future.
IMO multimedia should be "first-class". And embedding more information than
necessary in tag names is just /wrong/ and hampers compatibility and
exensibility.
