RE: Formal Objection to Working Group Decision to publish Encrypted Media Extensions specification as a First Public Working Draft (FPWD)

>> In *my* Open Web, any group that produces a specification and then releases
>> it to be used by others without any patent encumbrance is contributing to
>> the Open Web Stack. And funny enough, that seems to be how the web works
>> today.
>
> Surely that depends on the standard? If I write up a standard
> insisting that all webpages should be displayed with, say, a
> particularly nauseating puce background, bright purple text, and a
> pattern of dancing cupcakes down the left side... then that would
> hardly be an improvement, even if I were to release it without patent
> encumbrances.
>
> To *improve* the Open Web, a standard surely needs to pass the fairly
> minimal bar of being good for the users of the Open Web if
> implemented.

The minimal bar of a standards on the web is pretty simple and easy to define: something is a standard if a majority of the rendering engines intend to implement the feature and wish to support it. Considering that at least Microsoft and Google seem keen to implement the EME feature, it will become a standard if they so wish. 

It's up to User-agent makers to define standards. Meanwhile, some standards are not good and should not be used: it's up to authors to decide which features to use. If you believe using this feature is not an option for your website, don't use it. If you decide as an user not to browse websites that use the feature, don't browse them. This is your right. But it's not because as an author or as an user you don't want a feature that you can force the feature not to be implemented and therefore standardized.


I, for once, think __proto__ is an awful addition to ECMAScript that causes unexpected bugs and inconsistencies. It happens that __proto__ is implemented in a majority of browsers and they decided in common agreeing they would not drop it, and it therefore was added to the ECMAScript spec. I may dislike it, I may argue it does not pass my quality bar but that's how things work.

A wise man once said: "standardize what's implemented, implement what's standardized". Sorry, EME will be implemented and therefore should be standardized. That's the only way you can help reduce the platform fragmentation. Not standardizing it but still having many browsers supporting it would be worse.

Received on Friday, 31 May 2013 14:57:07 UTC