On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 4:02 PM, Marco Schuster
<marco(a)harddisk.is-a-geek.org> wrote:
I hope no one is ever insane enough to use this.
Imagine those people
with cellphones and no data transfer flat (~70% of mobile internet
users) - their bills will skyrocket when even a single video is set to
auto-preload.
On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 4:40 PM, Marco Schuster
<marco(a)harddisk.is-a-geek.org> wrote:
What about people who use tethering? A browser
can't determine if he
connects via a flatrate connection (DSL, company network) or via
tethering and a mobile connection.
The attribute is a hint, which user agents can respect or ignore as
they choose. Mobile user agents will probably buffer much more
conservatively than desktop UAs -- that's up to them. Other users who
don't like auto-buffering might be able to turn it off in their
browser options, or switch to a browser that allows them to do that
(as with any other feature they want). Or use a browser that doesn't
autobuffer at all by default.
On top of that, browsers can feel free to autobuffer only the first
few seconds, up to the point where they think they can play through
the whole video -- not the whole thing. Ten seconds of video now and
again is not going to exhaust anyone's bandwidth budget.
In real life, the vast majority of people who aren't using cell phones
aren't going to use up any bandwidth limit they might have by
occasional video downloads, even downloading the whole thing. They
would prefer faster video startup via autobuffering (if they're likely
to play the video). This is evidenced by the fact that video sites
actually do this -- if users were harmed more than helped by
autobuffering (or thought they were), popular video sites would avoid
it. We should use it for the same reason, wherever we think the user
is likely to watch the video -- e.g., on the video page itself.
The fact that one can imagine a small minority of users who might
hypothetically be harmed by autobuffering does not mean that it's
insane.