Re: Keep DRM out of Web standards -- Reject the Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) proposal

> From: Arthur Clifford <art@artspad.net>
> To: "public-html-comments@w3.org" <public-html-comments@w3.org>
> Cc:
> Sent: Thursday, June 20, 2013 2:37 PM
> Subject: Re: Keep DRM out of Web standards -- Reject the Encrypted Media
> Extensions (EME) proposal
>
> Thanks, that was educational.
>
> So, the bottom line is if one cares about DRM markup one should use XHTML
> as it has the flexibility one needs.

That was only about how to indicate metadata like rights and licenses within
the content, not about DRM. This should not be mixed up, such
metadata do not implicate a restriction for the user concerning accessibility
or usability of the document. DRM practically obfuscates information to
pseudo-noise, trash or something, that the user has to hack / convert into an 
accessible format, before the obfuscated information can be received.
Something like EME could be used as well as a starting point to learn
which type of encryption and software is used, to reverse engineer the
software to make published or bought obfuscated information accessible again.
If one only marks up metainformation, there is no need for this,
because both the information and the metainformation is accessible 
without specific efforts or elimination of barriers.

>
> And if DRM is desirable in HTML 5 then the discussion is really more around
> supporting namespaces to allow for rdf or other markup which would give
> HTML 5 the flexibility needed for using extant  drm markup.
>
> I think that pretty much exhausts the issue for me.

Note, that the HTML5 draft has an interesting element group for your use
case, you can markup something as a figure with a figure caption.
If you put your metadata into the figure caption of a figure, it is obvious, 
that this information belongs to this figure and nothing else.
If you need it machine readable or extractable, still you have to use
RDFa or something like that to indicate the kind of relation between
the text and the image.
If one uses the XML variant of HTML5 (that is in the XHTML-namespace), 
it is of course no problem as well to extent this and to use RDF etc directly
into the document or the head of the document to markup all these relations 
and metainformation.
Only if one insists to use the tag soup variant of HTML5, one has to
suffer from the restricitions especially created for namespace-less 
tag soup to keep it in the always morphing and opaque 
soup plate of some vendors.
But still in this case, using this figure element group one manages
to indicate the relation between the caption and the referenced
image, what is already a big progresss compared with the current
recommendation HTML4 or the old XHTML 1.0 without RDFa.


>
> Except I read your email before lunch and now I have to write to Think Geek
> and have them partner with whoever makes Alphabet Soup and have them come
> up with a Tag Soup product line ;)
>

Bon appetit!  for your users ;o)


Olaf

Received on Friday, 21 June 2013 10:37:26 UTC