Steven Rowat Reporter
	Description • 15 years ago

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060214 Firefox/3.0.11
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X 10.4; en-US; rv:1.9.0.11) Gecko/2009060214 Firefox/3.0.11

For background, please see this Mozilla developer blog and especially the critical comments:
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/html5-video-fallbacks/

As well, this open letter with multiple signatures:

http://camendesign.com/blog/letter_to_mozilla_re_video

I'm submitting essentially the same request that is in that letter, although in a more general form since I haven't personally tested to see that Camden's solution is the best one. 

I've done this because:

   a) I've been expecting/hoping for over 10 years that audio/video for web page writers would finally be available in a sensible, open, relatively simple way that isn't being hijacked by corporate struggles.
 
   b) Mozilla's announced implementation into v.3.5 of the HTML5 tags seemed finally to be breaching that threshold. 

   c) The fact that its recommended use by Mozilla (see above) would be using Javascript is extremely disappointing and I believe shooting-the-self-in-the-foot is an apt description of what Mozilla would be doing. And after 15 years with no bullets, too! :-) .

   d) After searching bugs and enhancements in various ways, I see no other reference to this in bugzilla, so I'm putting it in here.

Reproducible: Always

	Jo Hermans
	Comment 1 • 15 years ago

see bug 494379 and bug 481040

	Jo Hermans
	Comment 2 • 15 years ago

see also the bugs about the "native back-ends" : bug 422540, bug 435298 and bug 435339

	cajbir (:cajbir)
	Comment 3 • 15 years ago

So what is this bug exactly? If it's the fact that the controls don't work with JavaScript disabled. that's bug 449358. 

If it's the fact that you don't want Mozilla to use the video element with JavaScript on their website then it's filed under the wrong component.

Please expand on what this bug actually is.

	Steven Rowat Reporter
	Comment 4 • 15 years ago

My apologies, bug 449358 looks very close to what I'm describing here. (I scanned some hundreds of bugs via the usual submission interface but for some reason I didn't find it.) 

However, before jumping right to closing this one, as you request I'd like to try to clarify: this is an enhancement request based on the two links given above, which involve some intense discussion. The point of contention is whether Mozilla can handle audio and video tags for HTML5, including fallback for browsers that won't honor them directly, without using Javascript. I strongly agree with the view that this should be the goal. In fact probably using the tags at all should be put off if fallback requires JS to function (see reasons given in the discussion above).

So ...if bug 449358 hadn't existed I believe this enhancement request would have been appropriate to focus such a discussion here, but now I think it should be marked as duplicate. Perhaps they aren't identical but the overlap looks very great. I'll change the status.

	cajbir (:cajbir)
	Comment 5 • 15 years ago

> The point of contention is whether Mozilla can handle 
> audio and video tags for HTML5, including fallback
> for browsers that won't honor them directly, without 
> using Javascript. I strongly agree with the view that 
> this should be the goal. 

I think you'll find no one disagrees with you here. We consider the fact that the controls don't work without JavaScript a bug obviously. It's not a design choice. Note that even though the controls don't work, right click and using those controls does - so you can play videos without JavaScript using that approach.