- From: Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves <justivo@gmail.com>
- Date: Sat, 23 Jun 2007 18:58:35 +0100
Dear WHATWG members, It has come to my attention that Apple developers behind the WebKit platform, which powers the web browser Safari, apparently intend to support the video element of the HTML 5 spec, section 3.14.7. It's all fine and well, but not a victory for web interoperability, as they do not intend to follow the "User agents should support Theora video and Vorbis audio, as well as the Ogg container format" part. In their own words: "should support in a spec does not denote a requirement. We could have a perfectly suitable implementation of audio and video as seen in this draft spec without having theora/vorbis codecs available".[1] What this means, in my opinion, is that they will push for QuickTime video, in spite of the effort of the Opera developers to push Theora forward as the de facto standard for web video. Even if Mozilla and the KDE team prepare their web browsers to support Theora, by choosing to alienate it, Apple is allowing Microsoft to put WMV support alone in their Internet Explorer, for if Apple, one of the big players, shuns Theora, so will Microsoft. Considering the statistics, Internet Explorer being currently the web browser with bigger market share, it will force pretty much every web designer/programmer to stick to WMV only. As everyone is aware, WMV is not an open specification, nor a proper documented video format. Instead, it is heavily patented and locked in one single vendor: Microsoft. This will force vendors to either pay a license to legaly use WMV in their platforms, or to reverse engineer support for it, infriging on software patents in certain nations. This message is mostly an open letter to the Apple developers behind WebKit and to every other browser/UA developer. Please, do not shun Theora, or one of the following two things will happen: 1) either the video element will become unrelevant and non-successful, which is a shame considering its potential to revolutionize the web, 2) or everyone will be locked in whatever new version of WMV Microsoft releases in the following years--and expect some of these to be incompatible between each other. Best regards, Ivo Emanuel Gon?alves [1] http://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13708
Received on Saturday, 23 June 2007 10:58:35 UTC