Re: [whatwg] Video proposals

Jirka Kosek said:
> I think that specification of video codec doesn't belong to HTML
> specification. Codecs and media formats are changing much more rapidly
> then surrounding markup languages.

If you pick a format and freeze it, that format should be usable in the
future.  It doesn't matter if the landscape is changing as long as the
format selected is supported in the future.  Further, I imagine that, at
least for Safari and IE, the codec support will be tied to the operating
system.  The OS, for the most part, keeps up with newer worthwhile codecs
or accepts ways to add new codecs.  As far as Opera and Mozilla are
concerned, they seem to keep development cycles that are quick enough to
keep up with newer formats should they choose to implement them.

> But for maintaining interoperability it is necessary to define some
> basic set of widely recognized formats. I would support separate W3C
> effort to define "Web profile" which would say something like: "Your Web
> should be made only of HTML X.Y, CSS 2.1, GIF, PNG, JPEG, MP3 and Theora
> files if you want to be it accessible to the largest audience."

I think this list could get large and unwieldy unless they limit it to
certain file formats (where's MIDI, for example?).  It'd also be pretty
limiting.  For example, based on implementation, I don't know if we could
add CSS 2.1 to the list just yet (totally ignoring the mobile phone market
and text-only browsers)...  I think we'd end up with a long list of stuff
we don't really want to admit to.

To me, it's the designer's job to do browser testing and know which
formats work on which systems.  It's easier for a designer to check,
update, and keep an internal list of format he or she wants to use than it
would be for the W3C to keep up with a list (normative or not).

-- 
Robert <http://robertdot.org>

Received on Monday, 19 March 2007 22:14:34 UTC