Re: Codecs for <video> and <audio>

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 1:13 AM, Ian Hickson<ian@hixie.ch> wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Jul 2009, Julian Reschke wrote:
>> Ian Hickson wrote:
>> > ... Specification authors -- the W3C, the IETF, the WHATWG, you, me --
>> > have _zero power_ to enforce implementors to do what we put in our
>> > specs. We only get what we write to be implemented if what we write is
>> > what implementors are willing to implement. (This is why I work so
>> > closely with browser vendors and other implementors to find out what
>> > they want.) ...
>>
>> That makes it sound as if implementors never ever implement things they
>> don't want to implement. This may be true for browser implementors, but
>> certainly is not true in general.
>
> I think it's true in any market where deployment happens regardless of
> conformance.

I don't know about other browser, but I definitely haven't found it
true for gecko/firefox. We have at several times added support for
features that we don't want to add, simply because the alternative has
been worse. For example:

* Added support for nodeIterator in order to be complient with ACID3
as well as the traverse spec. I don't think it's a useful feature
(TreeWalker covers the needed usecases IMHO), but it wasn't worth the
hassle of trying to get it removed from the spec. It was deemed more
important to be complient with the spec in order for authors to be
able to rely on it.
* SVG. While many of us thought, and still think, that SVG is overly
complicated and not integrated enough with HTML, it was deemed more
important to have support for some vector format than to have that
vector format be better than SVG is.
* P3P. Back in the netscape days P3P support was added out of pressure
from the community and government. Only once it was clear that P3P was
unsuccessful and pressure to implement it disappeared, was support
removed.

/ Jonas

Received on Wednesday, 8 July 2009 18:37:40 UTC