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Bug 29318 - RFE: Header extension to request non-autostart of HTML5 audio/video
Summary: RFE: Header extension to request non-autostart of HTML5 audio/video
Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX
Alias: None
Product: HTML WG
Classification: Unclassified
Component: HTML5 spec (show other bugs)
Version: unspecified
Hardware: All All
: P2 normal
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: This bug has no owner yet - up for the taking
QA Contact: HTML WG Bugzilla archive list
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Whiteboard:
Keywords:
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Blocks:
 
Reported: 2015-12-01 17:42 UTC by Mike Ely
Modified: 2016-04-25 20:58 UTC (History)
5 users (show)

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Description Mike Ely 2015-12-01 17:42:10 UTC
Similar to the DO Not Track method, this would be a browser request to a website that any audio/video content on a page not start playing without user interaction. This would be a request only, and could be honored or ignored by site developers as their ethical standards dictate.
Comment 1 Roy T. Fielding 2015-12-01 21:17:09 UTC
Content is played by the user agent, not by the website.  The choice to do one or the other is in your browser preferences.  As such, sending a header field to the site is both ineffective and unnecessary.
Comment 2 Mike Ely 2015-12-01 21:26:28 UTC
(In reply to Roy T. Fielding from comment #1)
> Content is played by the user agent, not by the website.

Thanks for your reply. An appropriate response from a website to this header would omit the media content from the page served, with perhaps a static image previewing (and liking to) the available content instead. In addition to being far less annoying than the current situation, this would also offer bandwidth savings on both ends of the conversation.

Such an approach would certainly be preferable to having to install things like FlashBlock on the client side.
Comment 3 Roy T. Fielding 2015-12-01 21:51:04 UTC
It is not preferable because it causes the content to Vary based on the suggested request header field, which has the effect of disabling caching in far too many contexts.
Comment 4 Arron Eicholz 2016-04-25 20:58:59 UTC
HTML5.1 Bugzilla Bug Triage: Incubation needed

This bug constitutes a request for a new feature of HTML. The current guidelines [1], rather than track such requests as bugs or issues, please create a proposal outlining 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 [2]. As your idea gains interest and momentum, it may be brought back into HTML through the Intent to Migrate process [3].
[1] https://github.com/w3c/html#contributing-to-this-repository
[2] https://www.w3.org/community/wicg/
[3] https://wicg.github.io/admin/intent-to-migrate.html