dev page 9 - Dave's Blog

Linking to or Embedding a Portion of a Video

I'm excited by HTML5's video tag as are plenty of other people. Once that comes about and once media fragments are adopted, linking to or embedding a portion of a video will be as easy as using the correct fragment on your URL thanks to the Media Fragments WG who has been hard at work since the last time I looked at fragments.

However, until that work is embraced by browsers, embedding portions of videos will continue to require work specific to the site from which you are embedding the video. On the YouTube blog they wrote about how to "link to the best parts in your videos", using a fragment syntax like '#t=1m15s' to start playback of the associated video at 1 minute and 15 seconds. Of course if you want to embed part of a Hulu video it will be different. Although I haven't found an authoritative source describing the URL syntax to use, you can follow Hulu's video guide on linking to part of a video and note how the URL changes as you adjust the slider on the time-line. It looks like their syntax for linking to a Hulu page is to add '?c=[start time in seconds](:[end time in seconds])' with the colon and end time optional in order to link to a portion of a video. And the syntax for embedding appears to be "http://www.hulu.com/embed/.../[start time in seconds](/[end time in seconds])" again with the end time optional.

For more sites, check out the Media Fragments WG's list of existing applications' proprietary fragmenting schemes.

A Brief History of Microsoft's Live Search's New Domain Bing

• 2003 July: The first archived version of bing.com features "bing! is a small device (e.g., possibly even a small Band-Aid(R)-like sticker!) that vibrates when a person's cell phone rings." I can't recall 2003 cell phones, were they big enough to require this device?
• 2004 August: Site for the same device is rewritten and looks much better, IMHO.
• 2006 June: The domain is now parked by easyDNS. I guess the "bing!" device didn't work out?
• 2006 November: Its now "BING*" and they won't say what they're working on ("we're still in stealth mode") but they are hiring C#/.NET developers.
• 2007 January: And they're gone. Without even exiting stealth mode. Too bad, I liked their logo. Their domain is now for sale...
• 2007 February: Looks like EasyMail buys the domain and offers a physical mailing service in Australia: "By simply clicking a button on your computer, mail is beamed electronically to a bing post office. Your mail is automatically printed, folded, enveloped and dispatched into the Australia Post network the very same day."
• Present: Now its the new home for Live Search of course.

The new name reminds me of the show Friends. Also, I hope they get a new favicon - I don't enjoy the stretched 'b' nor its color scheme.

Netflix CSRF - Stolen Thoughts

Looking at the HTTP traffic of Netflix under Fiddler I could see the HTTP request that added a movie to my queue and didn't see anything obvious that would prevent a CSRF. Sure enough its pretty easy to create a page that, if the user has set Netflix to auto-login, will add movies to the user's queue without their knowledge. I thought this was pretty neat, because I could finally get people to watch Primer. However, when I searched for Netflix CSRF I found that this issue has been known and reported to Netflix since 2006. Again my thoughts stolen from me and the theif doesn't even have the common decency to let me have the thought first!

With this issue known for nearly three years its hard to continue calling it an issue. Really they should just document it in their API docs and be done with it. Who knows what Netflix based web sites and services they'll break if they try to change this behavior? For instance, follow this link to add my Netflix recommended movies to your queue.

Outline View Internet Explorer Extension

I've made another extension for IE8, Outline View, which gives you a side bar in IE that displays an outline of the current page and lets you make intrapage bookmarks.

The outline is generated based on the heading tags in the document (e.g. h1, h2, etc), kind of like what W3C's Semantic data extractor tool displays for an outline. So if the page doesn't use heading tags the way the HTML spec intended or just sticks img tags in them, then the outline doesn't look so hot. On a page that does use headings as intended though it looks really good. For instance a section from the HTML 4 spec shows up quite nicely and I find its actually useful to be able to jump around to the different sections. Actually, I've been surprised going to various blogs how well the outline view is actually working -- I thought a lot more webdevs would be abusing their heading tags.

I've also added intrapage bookmarks. When you make a text selection and clear it, that selected text is added as a temporary intrapage bookmark which shows up in the correct place in the outline. You can navigate to the bookmark or right click to make it permanent. Right now I'm storing the permanent intrapage bookmarks in IE8's new per-domain DOM storage because I wanted to avoid writing code to synchronize a cross process store of bookmarks, it allowed me to play with the DOM storage a bit, and the bookmarks will get cleared appropriately when the user clears their history via the control panel.