RE: On babies and bathwater (was Re: [rtcweb] Summary of Application Developers' opinions of the current WebRTC API and SDP as a control surface)

So we should have APIs that let JavaScript applications adapt to these different environments (like we do for everything else in "HTML5"), *not* try to solve this by making the API be "tickling the ship captain" and attempting to do everything else in a pairwise negotiation between two elements, one of which might not even be a browser.

Matthew Kaufman

From: Ted Hardie [mailto:ted.ietf@gmail.com]
Sent: Friday, July 19, 2013 10:07 AM
To: Martin Thomson
Cc: Adam Roach; Iñaki Baz Castillo; Cullen Jennings; Matthew Kaufman (SKYPE); <rtcweb@ietf.org>; public-webrtc@w3.org
Subject: Re: On babies and bathwater (was Re: [rtcweb] Summary of Application Developers' opinions of the current WebRTC API and SDP as a control surface)

On Fri, Jul 19, 2013 at 9:54 AM, Martin Thomson <martin.thomson@gmail.com<mailto:martin.thomson@gmail.com>> wrote:

Negotiation is a hole.  A vast, soul-sucking, waste of time.

Even if you have the same javascript application downloaded, you will have disparate capabilities in the environments into which it is downloaded (browser/os/codecs/media sources/available network capacity).  Getting set intersection and preference order for those capabilities is something that applications actually want.  You may be able to move the pain of that around, but it isn't a waste of time.

My personal opinion, with no IETF hats or company swag,

Ted