- From: Rob Sayre <rsayre@mozilla.com>
- Date: Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:49:25 -0400
- To: Sam Ruby <rubys@intertwingly.net>
- CC: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>, Doug Schepers <schepers@w3.org>, Robert O'Callahan <robert@ocallahan.org>, David Singer <singer@apple.com>, Joe D Williams <joedwil@earthlink.net>, Maciej Stachowiak <mjs@apple.com>, public-html@w3.org
On 7/2/09 8:55 PM, Sam Ruby wrote:
> If we don't have a commitment to support the video element at all by
> the dominant browser vendor, and the effective overlap in supported
> codecs between the next three major browser vendors is zero...
The spec won't mention "major browser vendors". Conformant client
implementations should interoperate. Thus, there needs to be a baseline
codec. The two codecs implemented in major browsers with <video> are
h264 (2 of 4) and Ogg (3 of 4), with one big [?] from the largest
browser by market share.
h264 is out the window as a baseline because it requires authors to pay.
Authors come before clients[1]. The baseline Ogg codec is not optimal
(h264 offers better performance in some situations, does not enjoy
unanimity), but it doesn't require authors to pay. Clients that don't
implement the baseline won't be conformant, so they won't have as good a
chance to interoperate. Seems pretty simple to me. We don't need to dumb
the spec down until everyone is conformant, as if this were Lake Wobegon
("where every child is above average").
- Rob
[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/html-design-principles/#priority-of-constituencies
Received on Friday, 3 July 2009 01:50:10 UTC