Vladimir_Nesov comments on Issues, Bugs, and Requested Features - Less Wrong

10 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 26 February 2009 04:45PM

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Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 15 March 2009 02:51:40PM *  1 point [-]

Youtube video embedding currently doesn't work. I place < object >...</ object > html code in the article, but nothing gets displayed when the article is viewed in Firefox. Internet Explorer 6.0 crashes trying to display such page.

Comment author: thomblake 16 March 2009 03:21:42PM 1 point [-]

This can't be a good thing. It seems like a link would be sufficient, and I don't think we need post authors dealing with difficult-to-implement-correctly tags.

Comment author: Vladimir_Nesov 16 March 2009 03:42:09PM 0 points [-]

I daresay that many sites and blogs do use video embedding, it is considered to be a good thing by many people, so saying that it "can't be a good thing" is unjustified.

Comment author: thomblake 17 March 2009 12:53:43AM 3 points [-]

I'm not sure what you mean by 'unjustified' here. If you mean I didn't provide a justification, you're incorrect - I specified two good reasons. I could list more, but I didn't think it was necessary.

Of course, that can't be what you meant, since 'it is considered to be a good thing by many people' isn't a reason to think that I didn't provide a justification.

However, that means that you believe 'it is considered to be a good thing by many people' is sufficient reason to think that 'saying that it "can't be a good thing" is unjustified'. Are you really taking that position here? If many people consider x to be a good thing, there cannot be a justification for "x can't be good"?

Reasons not to allow embedding:

  1. it can break stuff. Post authors are not required to know how not to do this.
  2. a link to a youtube video gives access to the same content
  3. adding flash to the page increases the browser's load and decreases the page's accessibility, which is annoying when some people don't care about the video.
  4. embedding flash via the object tag is arguably not the preferred method (as opposed to, say, javascript (for instance with swfobject)) and isn't backwards-compatible across browsers. (this relates to the accessibility concern)
  5. the default embedding code from YouTube uses the 'embed' tag, which is not valid HTML or XHTML by any standard.

Do you need more reasons?

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