Re: formal objection to one vendor/one vote

At 15:40  -0400 11/07/09, Sam Ruby wrote:
>Ian also took the opportunity to provide some insight[4] into his 
>decision making process.  In doing so, he created an impression that 
>he did so as Apple exercised a unilateral veto.  I believe that such 
>an impression is unfortunate, counter-productive, and not in line 
>with my understanding of either W3C or WHATWG processes.  In 
>particular, I actually believe that the accepted goal of the WHATWG 
>was two complete and bug-free implementations in 2022[5].  I do not 
>believe that Apple's participation is required to meet that goal. 
>In particular, I believe that there are at least three 
>implementations today which could form the basis for meeting that 
>goal, with required codecs, namely the browsers produced by Mozilla, 
>Google, and Opera.  Nor do I believe that Ian has talked to anybody 
>who can say with absolute certainty what Apple will or will not 
>support by 2022, as I don't believe that such a person exists.

Well, in particular, Apple didn't ask for a change to the document as 
it was, as we have not yet lost hope on finding consensus, which is 
clearly the desirable outcome.

Editing the document at this time has caused a huge amount of 
discussion, almost entirely overlapping previous discussions, and 
seems to have focused on whether, or not, Apple is or should be, 
exercising a veto.  I think it would be more useful to try to reach 
consensus.

>  * Second, we have Steven Faulkner who in Thursday's call[9]
>    indicated that he was intending to draft a spec, presumably
>    addressing accessibility issues including alt text and summary
>    attributes.  I'm hopeful that this will ultimately address ARIA.

I have also posted several times that I believe we need a substantive 
discussion on media accessibility, and provided some suggestions.  We 
cannot leave this area un-addressed.  Arguing about the codec (a 
discussion which can be deferred without damage) and not about 
accessibility (a design that will take time, take experimentation, 
and take refinement) is not good use of our time, IMHO.


-- 
David Singer
Multimedia Standards, Apple Inc.

Received on Monday, 13 July 2009 07:51:43 UTC