Skip to main content

Can I haz appearance:none; for the video element ?

I didn't think this was gonna be so hard to make a video NOT have native controls.

And it's not, at least not for the majority of web developers. You have a nice controls attribute on the video tag. Add it, you have native controls, don't add it and you won't.

The thing is however that many sites for many different reasons specify their own controls using Javascript. And I'd like to continue doing the same for Wikipedia.

And here is my problem pictured above. I call it the 'Flash of Native Controls'. Something like this is extremely distracting for visitors of the webcontent.

The solution seems simple. Just remove that controls attribute from your HTML. But I'd rather not do that.. And the reason is because at Wikipedia, we have many re-users of our generated HTML content. But most of those re-users don't use the same JS stack. Removing the controls attribute means they won't have videocontrols. I want controls, I just want MY controls instead of those of the user-agent.

Many other solutions have been suggested to me, but all have downsides. Messing with the HTML structure (sorry, don't want that), using inline scripts (want that even less), using iframes (nice, but I shouldn't have to) etc etc.

Honestly, I see this as a styling problem. I should be able to specify this using CSS in the head element, so that when the first paint of my HTML content occurs (usually well before the JS starts executing), my video already has no controls. The poster remains in a 'non-interactive' state a bit longer, but in general i'm fine with that. People won't watch a video in the first 300ms, but they will notice all those flashes when I have 50 video players on a site and a 3G connection.

And we used to have this in webkit browsers. Using CSS we could specify something like:
video::-webkit-media-controls { display:none !important; }
However, that is referring to Shadow DOM and those are supposed to be isolated 
And there never was a Firefox/IE version of this to begin with so :(
Image by Jason Z
I figure this really is not much different from type attributes for an input. This is semantic meaning.. It doesn't and shouldn't mean that I want the native controls. And browser vendors have recognized this, because even though it's not part of any standard, they have over the years provided web developers with the appearance CSS property, to give browser developers the option to take over the look of these increasingly specialized input controls.

What I need is an "appearance: none" for the video element really.

So why is this not a standard yet, and why couldn't we use the same property for the video tag ?

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

kAMDReceiveMessageError

We kept running into a kAMDReceiveMessageError in our company, when trying to install adHoc iPhone apps with the iPhone Configuration Utility for Windows. Everything was fine if people tried to install using Windows iTunes. After much time it was tracked to the addition of UIRequiredDeviceCapabilities to the Info.plist. For some very strange reason it seems that the Windows ICU doesn't like that property at all and fails to install any app that carries it. Not sure if this will affect AppStore submission, iTunes handles it and so does the Mac version of ICU it seems, but it is at the very least mildly annoying that testers can't install our application using Windows ICU.
Post a Comment
Read more

5 years of Article message boxes

Do you recognize these boxes ? Most likely you do. These are the very recognizable "amboxes", which is a short for " Article message boxes ". They are often visible at the top of articles in English Wikipedia and one of the most recognizable elements of those articles. Today I noticed that these boxes are now just over 5 years (and a month) old. They were first introduced to the general public starting from September 2007 . Their features are in short; a single consistent design, color coded for severity and purpose, dynamic but consistent in width (stackable), IE 5.5 and IE 6.0 compatible and a consistent parameter setup for its content. And that is a big deal, because I still remember what it looked like before when it had none of that. There were dozens of templates with different widths, different colors, different spacing and they all had different parameters. [I've been trying to find an image from back then, but I haven't been able to find one....
1 comment
Read more

MediaWiki; from svn to git & gerrit and a bit of math

Been a while since I wrote here. I wanted to discuss a great change that has come to MediaWiki , and it is the adaptation of  Git  and Gerrit  over our old Subversion system. It has been discussed at length already, but I wanted to discuss the actual switch process and what it meant for me as an individual. TLDR version: Little time, big switch, Gerrit needs lots of work, more coherent documentation needed and stay vigilant. Bad or Good cannot be stated yet. Where I'm coming from First of all, I should clarify that I already used Git quite a bit. We used it within  VideoLAN  and I use it myself almost on a daily basis as a wrapper around some of the Subversion repositories I use. So you could say that using it should not be too troublesome to me. I already know the commands and the principle ideas behind git and how they differ from other SCM systems . The only new addition is Gerrit... I have little time on my hands to work on Wikimedia and MediaWiki th...
1 comment
Read more