Re: CfC: Create Media Task Force

On 4/14/2012 1:13 PM, John Simmons wrote:
> The issue is whether end users who consume commercial multimedia content are better served by interoperability, and whether that interoperability should be defined in the W3C.

There exist popular OS-level and hardware-level APIs that HTML5 web 
applications can only use through a) Using the object tag or b) 
Extending HTML media and/or web apps interfaces.

Vendors make many decisions as to whether or not (and how) they will 
expose system settings. Largely, security and use cases are taken into 
account.
This is about allowing Web app developers to be peers with native app 
developers.

I'd like to hear from the chairs what it means to have an irresolvable 
dispute like this.

There seem to be two schools here:
Paternalism: Do what's good for the user; protect developers from making 
mistakes.
Liberalism: Expose APIs to web developers, allow consumers and producers 
to make decisions.

If anyone here can find a way to make conservatism and liberalism meet, 
we could use you in our political system. You'd be a star!

...

With some creative editing, on my part, here is the exchange that I 
believe marks an impasse:
http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Apr/0105.html

Mark Watson, an editor and proponent of the Media TF asks:
"Would it be sufficient in this case to be more specific and require 
that there is at least one interoperable UA implementation"

Robert O'Callahan replies:
"No, I don't think it would... in practice Hollywood requires all sites 
to use some 'Microsoft CDM' or 'Google CDM' that is only supported by 
the DRM vendor's browser."


Reflecting with a little more optimism, I can point out that Mozilla has 
compromised recently on media codecs:
"It’s possible to fall into the view that the only way to live up to 
Mozilla values is to ship the product we think people should want.  This 
aspect is one element, but it’s not the only one."
http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/03/18/video-user-experience-and-our-mission/1234/

"Clearly we have principles that prohibit us from abusing users for any 
end... we have never rejected encumbered formats handled by plugins, and 
OS-dependent H.264 decoding is not different in kind from 
Flash-dependent H.264 decoding."
http://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/03/video-mobile-and-the-open-web/


-Charles

Received on Saturday, 14 April 2012 21:17:48 UTC