1/13 Stories WG meeting
*Starting with slido q’s
Benjamin (B): Status for auto-ads in stories? Programmatic ads and beta.
Caleb (C): For a quick overview right now, if you’re an Ad Manager customer, anyone can do direct or reservation ads. That’s ready to go. We also have programmatic through Ad Manager in beta with selected publishers. It kept getting pushed back, but I expect it to be ready in the next month or so. We are also working on a product to auto generate stories from existing assets.
**B: **How can pubs sign up to that beta?
C: Our ads manager teams deal with that, but get in touch with us in slack and we can loop you in.
That was it for slido
Dima (D): [video related thing] We had a couple of prototype stories where we wanted to segment the video into separate visual chunks. I think this is normally called video-wall. The added complexity is that sometimes some of these segments are scaled slightly differently to create a more dynamic effect. To avoid loading the same video into separate video elements and synchronizing them, the idea is to load a single video element and render it into several canvases. One way we could do this is by creating a extension or such.
J: I've been wondering about canvas rendering for several reasons, including 360 video. Could be an interesting thing to investigate, although I'm not sure how much JS it would take to do it (e.g. videojs does this and it's like 2 MB).
D: It would be nice to have, but we don’t care about 360 too much.
J: Having a canvas implementation might make it easier to manage 360 video. It might be part of the same feature.
D: As we are standardizing on 9:16 layout, I think it'd be good to discuss if we could support it on in amp-story/amp-story-page/amp-story-page-layout.
D: Letterbox is not bad per se, as long as we have a say in it. What we want is a way of handling this. People have letterbox for their own reasons, if we let them do whatever they want it could be bad later on. We should standardize something for all surfaces (full bleed, desktop, mobile)
J: We have had lengthy discussions about this. It makes sense to standardize this, one of the problems is that the actual aspect ratio in the browser window of a mobile phone is not 9:16. Most phones have this screen aspect ratio, but they usually have other elements in the screen that make it rarely this tall (e.g. system buttons, url bar, browser buttons).
J: Hopefully this is something we can fix at the format level so that other tools can inherently get this benefit.
Charles Pauwels (CP): by letterboxing do we mean adding boxes at the sides to make it conform to the 9:16 aspect ratio?
J: Effectively yes, but currently we overlay a system layer on top of the story content. We could do this outside of the content (in the letterbox black box) and still make it feel immersive. It would also be beneficial to have a way to communicate this to you all.
Another solution is adding a layout primitive so that pubs can opt-in to the 9:16 ratio and support this for their stories.
CP: How would this behave on desktop?
J: That’s a good question and something we have to take into consideration. For folks that have decided to use 9:16 on desktop we could use that ratio, but for those who haven’t we could use what we use now (3:5).
Benjamin: we should fix the elements in the center and then expand the background image in the back to take the whole.
Gabriel: can we go back on why we have decided in 3:5, 9:16, because stories are consumed on different surfaces and apps. What if we have a carousel of stories and each has a UI per different story? My point is that it’s going to be hard a format that fits for all, and we have to think in making a UI feel consistent.
D: Agreed and that’s what we have to think about, because people are already doing this. So we have to find a solution that feels consistent and create standards.
Gabriel: my concern is that if we enforce it at the runtime level, 3p creation tools will also produce these (what platform am I supporting, what aspect ratio) and will create a lot of inconsistencies.
J: Something to note is that even in the letterbox approach, the background of the story is full bleed, it would just be the foreground that gets fixed in this ratio.
Caleb: would there be a validation rule that you can only use the letterbox if you have a certain responsive background?
J: Yes, we would have to enforce certain rules. Validation can’t know if e.g. object-fit is being used correctly. But if we have declarative, semantic rules then we can know this.
CP: But what if there are multiple backgrounds and we just pick the first background that we find in the grid layer? It seems restrictive.
J: we are not deprecating anything, it’s just for publishers that want to opt in to this.
J: we can’t restrict how people are doing letterboxing today, but we can just provide rules/advice on how to do it correctly.
CP: I saw that amp-quiz go referenced in the release notes?
J: it’s still a work in progress, not yet released. (release notes just reference PRs that were merged in). We are still polishing and validation pending.
CP: What are the status updates on embed / STAMP viewer?
Enrique: There was some back and forth in our discussions regarding the technology that it would use, specifically aiming for something that could be used in both AMP and non-AMP pages. But we have reached consensus and we are writing a separate JS library for the non-AMP version and an AMP extension for the AMP version. The implementation started last week and we should have something ready by this quarter.
CP: I think there’s a bug with image loading? Before an image appears there seems to be a weird placeholder.
J: yes that sounds like a bug, could you file a bug with whatever browser you are using?
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