Is this about exposing or not exposing a way to actually clip or change the ratio, or is this about providing a way for script to obtain the current aspect ratio or frame clipping settings from the video?

The former is a presentation issue, so seems out of scope (you can do it with CSS or SVG in a variety of ways), the latter just doesn't seem especially useful. I don't think there are explicit reasons for either to not be included per se, they just weren't requested.

Are there use cases for either? I'm not really sure what the request is here.

I believe they wanted to change the aspect ratio, but they at least wanted to read it.

The reasons to support it are given in the SMIL document -- they say it is sometimes important for quality.

I explicitly do not have the expertise to judge that claim, but since the working group made a specific note of the issue when reviewing an earlier draft, we should probably record somewhere that we were aware of the request, and explicitly chose simplicity rather than power (in this version/at this time).

-jJ

If you want to get the actual user-visible aspect ratio, then you can just do (video.videoWidth/video.videoHeight).

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Does the (video.videoWidth/video.videoHeight) solution implicitly assume that CSS pixels are square?   (Or is that explicit somewhere?)

If that is resolved, then I'm personally OK closing it, and letting anyone with more specific objections raise them directly.

-jJ

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Status: Did Not Understand Request
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: CSS pixels are by definition square (well, technically they're by definition circular), but that's a CSS issue and seems out of scope. I'm not sure what this bug is requesting at this point.

Based on Ian's comment (that pixels are circular), I think it would be enough to say that pixel ratios are defined by CSS, so that (video.videoWidth/video.videoHeight) provides the user-visible aspect ratio.

My slight preference would be to say that explicitly within the video sizing section, but if the editor feels strongly that it should be left implicit, I'm willing to be overruled.

(I therefore give the editor explicit permission to close this issue once he has either checked in a change, or made an explicit decision not to do so.)

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Status: Did Not Understand Request
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: I don't feel strongly at all, because I really don't understand what the problem is. What is the issue here? What is it that is unclear, or that cannot be done, or that is inconsistent? Saying that the intrinsic width divided by the intrinsic height is the intrinsic ratio seems to be somewhat pointless since that is the definition of the intrinsic ratio... what problem would saying that solve?

(video.videoWidth/video.videoHeight) is the aspect ratio in CSS pixels -- but without the knowledge that CSS pixes are square (or round), that doesn't tell the shape of the screen coverage.  For example, if I want a square output, but my device has twice the resolution in a horizontal direction, I would expect to need twice the height.

I would prefer that the ratio of pixels be explicit, but will (as I said before) accept that this just has to be known from CSS, so long as the omission is an explicit decision.

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Status: Rejected
Change Description: no spec change
Rationale: It is indeed an explicit decision (this is all defined in the CSS specs, which is why we defer to them, so we don't have to define this again). The idea here is that the Web platform abstracts out the underlying device characteristics precisely so that you don't need to know if the device pixels aren't square  it's the browser's job to make it work anyway.