On Thu, 07 Jun 2012 04:06:10 +0200, Kit Grose <[email protected]>
wrote:
On 06/06/2012, at 7:44 AM, Ian Hickson wrote:
On Fri, 13 Jan 2012, Kit Grose wrote:
I'd argue that while we did receive in WebM "a common codec" it does
not
enjoy the sort of universal adoption required to be able to mandate its
support in the spec, so on that logic, I think establishing a
declarative fallback mechanism is probably required to prevent a
situation where you cannot write a robust HTML5 page with video and
without resorting to JS.
I don't think it's time to give up yet, but maybe I'm overly
optimistic...
Is there any reason why it wouldn't be prudent to render the content of
the <video> element as HTML if the video cannot be played, given that
fallback content in the video element is already supported for legacy
browsers in the spec:
Content may be provided inside the video element. User agents should
not show this content to the user; it is intended for older Web
browsers which do not support video, so that legacy video plugins can
be tried, or to show text to the users of these older browsers
informing them of how to access the video contents.
How are legacy UAs without <video> support appreciably different from a
UA with restrictive or limited <video> support? Surely the author's
intent in either case is delivering the content in a different way or
delivering appropriate alternate content.
Even if we eventually get a common codec (which I—perhaps overly
pessimistically—feel is unlikely), authors are already using the <video>
element without supplying whatever that eventual codec will be, and
users are suffering without reasonable fallbacks.
As it stands, it's almost better (and certainly easier) for authors to
default to Flash video and use the existing, declarative fallback
behaviour of the <object> element to use a <video> element instead. That
can't be in the best interest of the open web.
This was discussed in the thread "HTML 5 video tag questions" in 2009:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-whatwg-archive/2009Jul/thread.html#msg278
The resource selection algorithm never fails - it simply waits for another
source to be inserted - so the the hard part is when to show the fallback
content. At the time I was very skeptical of switching back and forth
between fallback and trying to load a video as more source elements are
added, and I still am.
--
Philip Jägenstedt
Core Developer
Opera Software
