[Actions] Use case for actions: Presentation automation

[alvestrand]

A frequent desire (ie a feature found in many non-Web-based products) is the ability to script a presentation - making slides, media playback and other actions appear in a known, timer-driven sequence, with controls for pausing and resuming the playback of the sequence completely decoupled from the activities of the presentation.

If one were to capture a presentation that does not provide such a feature, but did support capture-actions, the scripting tools could be supplied by the capturer, allowing scripted presentations from any capture-actions supporting tool.

Should this be considered among the use cases that -actions needs to satisfy?

[eladalon1983]

The underlying topic seems to be "should we really require activation?"

• Automation is one argument against activation.
• A second argument is that it might be desirable to produce some "setup" immediately when capture starts. For example, send "mute" and "first". Would be nice to not require activation for that, let alone two activations.

I think we need to establish the following principle in general - when someone wishes to introduce the requirement of transient activation (or similar) for an API, it's incumbent upon them to provide a hypothetical, credible abuse-case that would be prevented by the requirement of activation.