Outline of the IG Note on Web Media API Integration Guidelines

[JohnRiv]

As requested during the April 7, 2020 MEIG call, I've put up a PR of the outline of the proposed Web Media API Integration Guidelines IG Note document.

ReSpec required an editor, so I've put my name there for now. I'm happy to help edit, but I cannot do it alone, so anyone that is willing to be a co-editor with me is welcome to mention that 😃

The initial discussion that drove this took place in w3c/webmediaporting#30. To help focus the conversation until this PR is merged, I propose that:

• The discussions around the technical issues & answers continues in guidelines on integration of web media APIs with hardware video & audio decoders webmediaporting#30 for now
• The discussion in this PR specifically will be to gather consensus on the title of the note and if it makes sense to host it here or in its own repo.

Once we have a title and location for this PR to be merged into, we can migrate the conversations to the same repo where this note will be worked on.

[chrisn]

Thank you! As we start this activity in the IG, I want to clearly define the purpose and scope of the document.

Going back to issue 30, the starting points are: (1) the need for improved interoperability for media devices, and (2) that changing HTML spec is unrealistic.

While (1) is certainly true, I'd like to clarify whether the goal for the document is information gathering, or producing a set of guidelines. I would be concerned about the IG producing a Note with content similar to, e.g., section 9.6 in the HbbTV spec, for example, which sets requirements how resource contention should be handled by media players.

For (2), the IG's role here could be to help coordinate bringing issues to WHATWG. The mediaElement.currentTime clarification issue seems straightforward, for example.

Input from the Chrome team in issue 30 suggests useful aspects to explore further: "there may be a core set of principles we can document" and "there will come a future time where we can drop the illusion and just fail playback when resources are constrained". So I think there is a useful discussion to be had.

I'd prefer to see this in it's own repo. Issue 30 contains a large number of questions, so would be helpful to raise individual issues for each one.

[JohnRiv]

Thanks for the comments, @chrisn! As far as purpose & scope, I agree that we do not want to set requirements for devices, as other documents such as section 9.6 of the HbbTV spec addresses that.

What I think would be best is if we take this approach for each issue:

1. Gather information on how various user agents & devices actual handle the issue raised for documentation purposes
2. If there is a discrepancy and we can determine a guideline for web developers to handle it, we can include that information in the note
3. If it after that exercise it makes sense to bring something to the WHATWG or WICG to standardize, we can facilitate presenting the issue to the appropriate group. That would be an intended side-effect of the process, but have no additional impact to the note the IG produces other than perhaps linking to an issue tracking the standards specification updates

I welcome everyone's thoughts

[JohnRiv]

I don't have sufficient permissions to create a new repo in the W3C Github org to host this... can someone who does (@tidoust ?) create one and I'll move this over? We can use me-media-integration-guidelines as the repo name as @chrisn originally suggested (and if there's a strong desire to change the repo name later, we certainly can)

[chrisn]

Sorry for the delay in following this up. We discussed among the MEIG chairs today, so let's go ahead and create the repo. I'll need help from @tidoust or @ashimura as I can't create new repos myself.

Once that's in place I'd suggest we raise each item in issue 30 as its own issue, so we can consider each one individually.

[tidoust]

@chrisn said:

Sorry for the delay in following this up. We discussed among the MEIG chairs today, so let's go ahead and create the repo. I'll need help from @tidoust or @ashimura as I can't create new repos myself.

I just created w3c/me-media-integration-guidelines, set with appropriate parameters and a skeleton ReSpec document, and invited @JohnRiv to editing team.

[JohnRiv]

Thanks François! Once I migrate this PR and the issues over to that, I'll close this PR