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"The poster attribute gives the address of an image file that the user agent can show while no video data is available." When the first frame of the video is useless, like it is often the case for movie trailers, it would be much better to display the poster frame instead, even if the video data is available, especially since the preload attribute is only a hint (so there is no real way to prevent the video from being downloaded, besides not setting the source). I would suggest instead two possible approaches: - display the poster image if the video hasn't been played at all (played attribute contains no time ranges) - display the poster image if the video is paused and at currentTime is 0
EDITOR'S RESPONSE: This is an Editor's Response to your comment. If you are satisfied with this response, please change the state of this bug to CLOSED. If you have additional information and would like the editor to reconsider, please reopen this bug. If you would like to escalate the issue to the full HTML Working Group, please add the TrackerRequest keyword to this bug, and suggest title and text for the tracker issue; or you may create a tracker issue yourself, if you are able to do so. For more details, see this document: http://dev.w3.org/html5/decision-policy/decision-policy.html Status: Accepted Change Description: no spec change Rationale: The spec already requires this in the parts of the spec that actually define how poster="" works. The sentence you quote is just the descriptive (non-normative) introduction to the attribute.