Iframe Media Pausing

Unofficial Proposal Draft,

This version:
https://github.com/WICG/iframe-media-pausing
Issue Tracking:
GitHub
Editor:
Gabriel Santana Brito (Microsoft)

Abstract

This specification defines a new permission policy that allows the user-agent to pause media playback in iframes which are not visible to the user.

Status of this document

This specification was published by the Web Platform Incubator Community Group. It is not a W3C Standard nor is it on the W3C Standards Track. Please note that under the W3C Community Contributor License Agreement (CLA) there is a limited opt-out and other conditions apply. Learn more about W3C Community and Business Groups.

1. Introduction

This section is non-normative.

Web applications that host embedded media content via iframes may wish to respond to application input by temporarily hiding the media content. These applications may not want to unload the entire iframe when it’s not rendered since it could generate user-perceptible performance and experience issues when showing the media content again. At the same time, the user could have a negative experience if the media continues to play and emit audio when not rendered. This proposal aims to provide web applications with the ability to control embedded media content in such a way that guarantees their users have a good experience when the iframe’s render status is changed.

1.1. Goals

Propose a mechanism to allow embedder documents to limitedly control embedded iframe media playback based on whether the embedded iframe is rendered or not:

Conformance

Document conventions

Conformance requirements are expressed with a combination of descriptive assertions and RFC 2119 terminology. The key words “MUST”, “MUST NOT”, “REQUIRED”, “SHALL”, “SHALL NOT”, “SHOULD”, “SHOULD NOT”, “RECOMMENDED”, “MAY”, and “OPTIONAL” in the normative parts of this document are to be interpreted as described in RFC 2119. However, for readability, these words do not appear in all uppercase letters in this specification.

All of the text of this specification is normative except sections explicitly marked as non-normative, examples, and notes. [RFC2119]

Examples in this specification are introduced with the words “for example” or are set apart from the normative text with class="example", like this:

This is an example of an informative example.

Informative notes begin with the word “Note” and are set apart from the normative text with class="note", like this:

Note, this is an informative note.

References

Normative References

[RFC2119]
S. Bradner. Key words for use in RFCs to Indicate Requirement Levels. March 1997. Best Current Practice. URL: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2119