- From: Charles Pritchard <chuck@jumis.com>
- Date: Sat, 14 Apr 2012 14:17:29 -0700
- To: John Simmons <johnsim@microsoft.com>
- CC: Kornel Lesiński <kornel@geekhood.net>, "public-html@w3.org" <public-html@w3.org>
On 4/14/2012 1:13 PM, John Simmons wrote: > The issue is whether end users who consume commercial multimedia content are better served by interoperability, and whether that interoperability should be defined in the W3C. There exist popular OS-level and hardware-level APIs that HTML5 web applications can only use through a) Using the object tag or b) Extending HTML media and/or web apps interfaces. Vendors make many decisions as to whether or not (and how) they will expose system settings. Largely, security and use cases are taken into account. This is about allowing Web app developers to be peers with native app developers. I'd like to hear from the chairs what it means to have an irresolvable dispute like this. There seem to be two schools here: Paternalism: Do what's good for the user; protect developers from making mistakes. Liberalism: Expose APIs to web developers, allow consumers and producers to make decisions. If anyone here can find a way to make conservatism and liberalism meet, we could use you in our political system. You'd be a star! ... With some creative editing, on my part, here is the exchange that I believe marks an impasse: http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-html/2012Apr/0105.html Mark Watson, an editor and proponent of the Media TF asks: "Would it be sufficient in this case to be more specific and require that there is at least one interoperable UA implementation" Robert O'Callahan replies: "No, I don't think it would... in practice Hollywood requires all sites to use some 'Microsoft CDM' or 'Google CDM' that is only supported by the DRM vendor's browser." Reflecting with a little more optimism, I can point out that Mozilla has compromised recently on media codecs: "It’s possible to fall into the view that the only way to live up to Mozilla values is to ship the product we think people should want. This aspect is one element, but it’s not the only one." http://blog.lizardwrangler.com/2012/03/18/video-user-experience-and-our-mission/1234/ "Clearly we have principles that prohibit us from abusing users for any end... we have never rejected encumbered formats handled by plugins, and OS-dependent H.264 decoding is not different in kind from Flash-dependent H.264 decoding." http://hacks.mozilla.org/2012/03/video-mobile-and-the-open-web/ -Charles
Received on Saturday, 14 April 2012 21:17:48 UTC