Encourage transparent content negotiation (for media resolution and bitrate)

Problem statement / use cases

• Authors need to deliver content at increasingly wide disparities of bitrates and resolutions
• Users may wait an inordinate length of time for high resolution or high bitrate content to download when they do not have the resources to consume them
• Users may have high resolution or high bitrate handling devices, but must consume degraded content as authors need to cater to the lowest common denominator
• The HTML5 proposed SOURCE element provides some solution to these problems, but it is geared only toward VIDEO and AUDIO and not still images or other potential bit-volume varying content
• The HTML5 proposed SOURCE element only works for pre-specified discrete representations or versions of a resource
• Delivering device-independent content at print-quality resolutions pushes these problems to the extreme, but with devices getting smaller and larger at the same time the disparity in the resolution required for images grows too

Proposed solutions

• Encourage HTML5 UAs to support transparent content negotiaton
• Establish norms for media content negotiation
• Add SOURCE element to OBJECT element content model

Discussion and evaluation

Email

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See also

• Transparent Content Negotiation in HTTP (RFC2295)