Review of "Add a multimedia domain #27"

[Keith Schengili-Roberts <keith.roberts@ixiasoft.com>]

I had already sent this separately to Chris directly, but I think I am supposed to send this to the group.

The following was originally meant as a stage 2 critique, but I understand from Chris that the following should prove useful for his work on stage 3.

--Original message --

The proposal looks great, and I checked everything against the latest spec for HTML5 and everything stands up, ditto the arguments for the attributes that are deliberately being excluded.

A question regarding the associated elements: your DTD and example code suggests that media-controls, media-autoplay and media-loop (for example) should be value="true|false", but I note that the equivalent in HTML5 is more like <audio controls="controls"> or <audio loop="loop"> or <audio controls loop> (all equivalents for "true"). While I'm not advocating the W3C's "loopy" approach to this, am wondering if it might be worthwhile to be more explicit as to why we are taking this approach. 

My only other quibbles are with the examples. In the first instance, you reference an audio file ("An audio element with a single source") but the example uses the video element rather than audio. From a technical perspective I think this is possible, but I think the intention was to show an example using the audio element. Also, from a best practices perspective, isn't it always a good idea to throw in fallback? That would make a revised audio example look like this:

<!-- An audio element with a single source -->

<audio data="">
   <fallback="Audio playback is unavailable" />
</audio>

The other examples are fine, I would just like to see more of them. 

Suggested code for audio with multiple sources/audio types:

<!-- An audio element with the same audio content in three different formats -->
<audio data="">
   <media-source value="mysong.wav" type="audio/wav" />
   <media-source value="mysong.ogg" type="audio/ogg" />
   <fallback="Audio playback is unavailable" />
</audio>

Suggested code for audio with audio controls explicitly turned on, and automatic looping disabled:

<!-- An audio element with controls turned on, and looping turned off -->

<audio data="">
   <fallback="Audio playback is unavailable" />
   <media-controls value="true" />
   <media-autoplay value="false" />
   <media-loop value="false" /> 
</audio>

Cheers!

 

-

Keith Schengili-Roberts

Market Researcher and DITA Evangelist

 

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