Re: Codecs for <audio> and <video>

Ian,

I have repeatedly seen you use the idea of a "first version" of HTML5
and delaying the solution to several problems to a "second version" of
HTML5. It has been communicated to me offline that this has caused
misunderstandings with some people and since I am not 100% sure I
understand the situation, let me ask for clarification.

Could you confirm what I have come to understand by these versions,
namely: you are currently driving the specification to a "first stable
version" by October this year for a Last Call (as mentioned in the
email ecerpt below). After this, issues such as a commonly agreed
baseline codec, or captions, or music playlists, and much more, will
become more relevant again and you are expecting to work on these for
a "second stable version".

I - like many others - am disappointed that e.g. video accessibility
hasn't made it into the spec at this point in time, but I do
understand the pressures you're working under and that the lack of
implementations by browser vendors does not give you confidence in any
of the currently proposed captioning approaches. Thus, I have accepted
the conditions under which we are working and accepted that there will
be extensive work on standardising captioning happening again by the
end of this year.

Is this a correct interpretation of the situation? If not, would you
mind to please clarify?

Thanks,
Silvia.


On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 10:19 AM, Ian Hickson<ian@hixie.ch> wrote to
the WHATWG mailing list:
> On Fri, 3 Jul 2009, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
>> That I can understand. But in this case, you should leave the paragraph
>> in the spec that states the need for a baseline codec, since the
>> situation hasn't changed and we are still striving for a baseline codec.
>
> I'm not holding up the spec just because we haven't found a codec to use
> with the spec. This working group can override me on this if it is the
> desire of the group, but in the meantime, I'm trying to drive down to Last
> Call by October and part of that is going through open issues and either
> resolving them, or admitting that they can't be resolved by then and
> moving on. The alternative is to deadlock, and that is worse.

Received on Saturday, 4 July 2009 15:36:26 UTC