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Bug 26132 - Add "metered-network-autoplay" attribute to <HTML> tag with values that will help browser to restrict autoplay based on available bandwidth.
Summary: Add "metered-network-autoplay" attribute to <HTML> tag with values that will ...
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: HTML5 spec (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All All
: P2 enhancement
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: This bug has no owner yet - up for the taking
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords: media
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2014-06-18 07:58 UTC by Sridhar
Modified: 2016-04-20 21:16 UTC (History)
6 users (show)

See Also:

Attachments

Description Sridhar 2014-06-18 07:58:39 UTC 
All of the mobile browser providers have disabled the 'autoplay' behaviour in the mobile browsers since there is a high likelihood of mobile devices using metered networks. This does not leave the developers with a choice to autoplay media content on the devices. Game developers could find this especially restrictive for providing the right user experience. Not insignificant  proportion of mobile device usage happens over unmetered network and having an option to autoplay media on mobile devices is quite useful. My proposal is to add an attribute to the HTML tag of a webpage, value of which will determine if media tags which have autoplay="true" can be auto played, based on the type of the network (as provided by Network Information API - https://dvcs.w3.org/hg/dap/raw-file/tip/network-api/Overview.html#idl-def-NetworkInformation)  

example : 

<HTML metered-network-autoplay="false">
<HTML metered-network-autoplay="true">

Default value for the metered-network-autoplay attribute will be "false" .

If this is implemented, webpage developers can provide better user experience where network permits.
Comment 1 Philip Jägenstedt 2014-06-18 12:19:57 UTC 
If browser implementors are interested in removing the playback restrictions (note that this goes beyond autoplay) for unmetered networks, couldn't they simply remove the restrictions in that case? Why is a new HTML feature needed for this?
Comment 2 Mounir Lamouri 2014-06-30 10:18:38 UTC 
Network Information API used to have a metered attribute but there were a lot of complaints about it (mostly about the inability to be sure that a connection was metered). I am not sure that metered-network-autoplay will be able to fly without solving those issues.
Comment 3 Arron Eicholz 2016-04-20 21:16:20 UTC 
HTML5.1 Bugzilla Bug Triage: 

This bug constitutes a request for a new feature of HTML. Our current guidelines, rather than track such requests as bugs or issues, is to create a proposal for the desired behavior, or at least a sketch of what is wanted (much of which is probably contained in this bug), and start the discussion/proposal in the WICG (https://www.w3.org/community/wicg/). As your idea gains interest and momentum, it may be brought back into HTML through the Intent to Migrate process (https://wicg.github.io/admin/intent-to-migrate.html).