Comments on: HTML5 Media Support: video and audio tags and scriptability

By: Daniel Luz

Daniel Luz — Sun, 25 Nov 2007 15:24:31 +0000

Marcel, that is exactly how XHTML has been handling boolean, “valueless” attributes, like “checked” and “disabled” in form elements.

By: Zsolt

Zsolt — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 12:21:25 +0000

@Axel
as far as i know the video tag uses the Theora codec, so install that and everything should be good.

By: Marcel

Marcel — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 10:37:11 +0000

Anne, I understand there are standards, I’m just saying that – in my opinion, anyway – attributes and their respective values should make sense. To me, “autoplay=autoplay” looks rather unconventional.

Alas, HTML5 is still several years away from mainstream use and abuse. For now I’ll stick with Flash videos where necessary, and I’ll be putting them in my pages using javascript ;-)

By: Anne van Kesteren

Anne van Kesteren — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 08:20:03 +0000

Kyriakos, such a feature is kind of the point. If there was no autoplay=”" attribute authors would implement that by script, which would make it way harder for people to disable if they wanted to.

By: emil

emil — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 22:36:45 +0000

@jacob
Of course, shame on me, did not scrolled source code to the right…

By: EmEhRKay

EmEhRKay — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 22:28:30 +0000

@Axel

Maybe we’ll get a VLC webplugin

By: Jacob

Jacob — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 22:13:26 +0000

@emil
it will play only the first video. If you look closely you’ll see that the code is: “var myVideo = document.getElementsByTagName(‘video’)[0];”

By: Axel

Axel — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 21:19:16 +0000

Yippee! Now we need to back to installing every codec ever made again! I can hardly wait!

By: emil

emil — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 20:26:50 +0000

There’s something strange in JS code: getElementsByTagName usually returns array, so what myVideo.play() code will intend to do if there are more than one video tag? Play them all? huh

By: Kyriakos

Kyriakos — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 18:57:22 +0000

I feel that the “autoplay” feature is a bad bad idea. At least i am sure it will get abused browsers will eventually come up with a Disable Autoplay for video/audio option.

By: Anne van Kesteren

Anne van Kesteren — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 18:43:29 +0000

Marcel, we want it to remain consistent with the rest of the HTML standard.

By: Zsolt

Zsolt — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 14:33:57 +0000

Do not forget to check out Opera’s implementation
http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/a-call-for-video-on-the-web-opera-vid/

By: Marcel

Marcel — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 14:15:28 +0000

Attributes should have values indeed. But “autoplay=autoplay” doesn’t make sense, really. If it’s a boolean value you could just make it “autoplay=true” or “autoplay=yes”, much more readable and it makes more sense, grammatically.

By: EmEhRKay

EmEhRKay — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 13:07:32 +0000

Very cool and a great step in the right direction. I like how these media items are treated as regular elements in the dom. But I can easily see this being an issue across browsers, IE will handle how it knows when a video has started or stopped differently than FF, etc.
I would have thought that the autoplay attribute would be autoplay=”autoplay” just like any other valid tag attribute.