Respect User Data
Hi,
One very essential rule in software development in my opinion is “Respect User Data”, which means essentially that a program should not put data that belongs to the user at risk unnecessarily. Actually unless it is physically absolutely impossible to keep the data it should be kept.
Unfortunatly not every software developer follows that rule. I own a handheld gps device from a major vendor, and not too long ago, I wanted to record a little journey, to keep track of my position, and I wanted to upload that data to my PC for later processing. I was out a couple of hours, and when I came back I noticed that the beginning of my track was missing. Apperently the device was configured to overwrite older data with newer data, und the buffer of the track-log was full.
User error? Maybe, I should not have used this option. But, there was plenty of space left on the device, because it showed 20 empty slots for storing tracks. So obviously there was enough space on the storage element to record longer tracks, yet the developers added an arbitrary, undocumented limit about how long a track might be. I checked the manual, and there was no notice or warning about how long a recorded track could be. There was no warning message or notice on the display that the track buffer was full. This company decided that it is acceptable to silently discard valueable user data for …, well for keeping the devices storage empty. Great design choice.
-Richard
PS.: Interestingly enough the whatwg decided to specify a <video> html tag. It is funny though that I proposed exactly that feature on the mozilla whishlist. It seems as if it made sense to someone. 
Or maybe it is just that the time has come for this.