This is an archived snapshot of W3C's public bugzilla bug tracker, decommissioned in April 2019. Please see the home page for more details.
Olli says he thinks float is the wrong type and I think I agree its suboptimal. It might also be better to use miliseconds than seconds.
float was chosen for consistency with currentTime in a HTMLMediaElement. [1] (There's also some additional discussion on this topic in other emails in that thread.) If you have an alternative suggestion, please make a specific proposal. [1] http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-speech-api/2012Oct/0001.html
I like it how it is, consistency with HTMLMediaElement makes sense - that's the only other place in the HTML5 spec where elapsed time of multimedia is found.
implementing and using elapsed time as a float seemed natural to me. i also liked having it in seconds, which is a natural base to use. when dealing in milliseconds you always end up making a mistake and then having to fix it
The platform is in no way consistent with time handling. setTimeout etc use milliseconds but looks like Audio API has seconds. I guess I can live with float.