0.11.25 — the recording plays in the tile

Since 0.11.19 an entry could carry a recording instead of text: a field with the identifier and a landscape or portrait layout. It was built for one case, though — the outgoing entry, a pointer to someone else's material. The condition for embedding read “has an external address and has a recording”, so our own entry with a recording fell out of it entirely and showed an ordinary photograph in its tile.

The reasoning behind that condition was this: the tile of our own entry is the door to its page, and a player in a doorway gets in the way. True, as long as the entry's content is text. It stops being true when the content is the recording itself. Making a reader open the page in order to press play protects nothing then — it is one click too many for nothing.

The condition is now the recording alone. The difference stayed where it means something: the description below the player leads to the entry's page when the entry is ours, and to the source in a new tab when it is outgoing. The frame and tint of an outgoing entry belong to the outgoing tile only — our own tile looks like every other one in the series, with the author and the rating in its heading line. A tile with a player is still not one single link; a play button has no business standing inside a link, and that has not changed.

The curtain applies in both cases, and that is the most important part of this release. A YouTube frame contacts someone else's server from the first second, including for a reader who started nothing, and a list can hold a dozen such tiles at once. So the tile holds a thumbnail from our own storage and a button, and the frame — at the cookieless address — arrives only once someone asks for it. Extending the embedding without extending the curtain would have traded convenience for a dozen connections nobody requested.

Nothing changed on the entry's page: an outgoing entry has the curtain there, our own embeds the frame straight away, because the reader came for that recording. Whether this should stay a difference, or the curtain should cover everything, is still open and sits in the engine's debt.