Re: 'what is the web' Re: Encrypted Media proposal: Summary of the discussion so far

On Tue, 06 Mar 2012 12:16:36 -0000, Charles McCathieNevile  
<chaals@opera.com> wrote:

> W3C is about what the sum of its participants decide it is about. W3C
> includes people who claim that anything you can't google is out of scope,
> as well as people who claim it would be stupid to restrict what we do to
> only that content which is freely available, since we would lose the  
> value of people who are required to work on closed content and are  
> interested in making it part of the web. I am in the latter camp.

I don't think there's any disagreement about giving access to commercial  
content in general.

The question is how it is done — whether open standards are good for this,  
or whether a non-free DRM component is required, and which solution is  
going to be better for the health of the web.

> Early Web content tended to be a shim of HTML linking up a web full of  
> proprietary documents locked in closed systems, both parts being  
> essential to the function. Today's Web experience often includes the  
> reverse - a shim of proprietary content locked in a search engine that  
> links up a massive amount of public data. I suspect everyone agrees that  
> would be stupid to attempt to restrict the Web to work only with search  
> systems that are open and public, and I don't see why it makes sense to  
> try to restrict it in the other direction.

It's not about restricting the Web — there is no restriction there at all.  
Google and Microsoft are in power to add whatever they want to their  
browsers and use it on the web.

Here W3C only restricts what can be *called* a W3C recommendation, and  
IMHO it makes perfect sense to restrict open standards to systems that are  
fully open and public. Closed systems can coexist on the Web, they can  
even have specs for their superficial parts, they just cannot use W3C's  
name.

-- 
regards, Kornel Lesiński

Received on Tuesday, 6 March 2012 17:04:05 UTC