The curious CanPlayType()

One of the great challenges in coding is naming stuff. And by stuff, I mean variables, functions, methods, responses, everything that needs a name - all the stuff.

Over the years I went from naming my variables something short like 'newImg' to something more descriptive like 'imageAfterTransformation', I know it seems obvious but sometimes it's hard to name things. You have an array of images, 'imagesArray' and then somehow you get a second image array and you end up with 'imagesArray2'.

The struggle is real.

So, I take comfort knowing that even the people working on web standards face the same challenge.

Exhibit A: The canPlaytype() method.

If you need to test the browser to check if a media file is playable canPlayType() is here to help, check the code snippet bellow:

const audio = document.createElement("audio");
const canPlayOgg = audio.canPlayType("audio/ogg; codecs=opus");

if (canPlayOgg === "maybe") {
  return "Maybe the browser can play the file. Maybe not.";
}

if (canPlayOgg === "probably") {
  return "I mean, the browser can probably play it but it's a guess game really.";
}

if (canPlayOgg === "") {
  return "No can do, sir!";
}

That's right. canPlayType() returns 3 results: maybe, probably and an empty string. English is not my first language, so I thought I was missing some nuance between them but after asking around I couldn't get an agreement on the difference between maybe and probably.

I like these Javascript quirkiness's, they keep me on my toes.