Re: On the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) document

On Fri, Feb 8, 2013 at 6:10 PM, Philippe Le Hegaret <plh@w3.org> wrote:
> This clarification is not a statement of support towards the technical
> approach taken in the EME specification or the CfC itself.

It isn't quite clear how broad a statement that is.

Is the Team taking a position on whether it's appropriate for a W3C
specification to rely exclusively on components that cannot be
independently interoperably implemented when the specification is used
for its intended purpose? (Clear Key does not count, because none of
the proponents of EME intend to use Clear Key in production.)

It is worth noting that the pluggability of codecs does not set
precedent for this question. At the time when the codecs were left
pluggable, it was expected that codecs that would not be RF would be
plugged into the extension point, but those codecs (H.264 and AAC
specifically) were still expected to be independently interoperably
implementable, since they were specified without secrets.

Is the Team taking a position on whether it's appropriate for a W3C
specification to include mandatory parts whose sole purpose is
debugging or satisfying the form of the W3C Process? (Again, it
appears that none of the proponents of EME intend to use Clear Key in
production. No one has stepped up credibly arguing that they
themselves would put Clear Key to substantial production use. All
suggested production use scenarios for Clear Key have been contrived
in the sense that they'd be better addressed by another solution that
the proponents of EME we not interested in pursuing [http+aes].)

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/

Received on Monday, 11 February 2013 07:41:59 UTC