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Comment by mikeryan | Hacker News Reader

This seems to work under a bit of a hazy assumption that there needs to be a "baseline" video codec. The image tag has worked fine without a "baseline" image format since the dawn of the web.

If using a baseline format was their real argument they wouldn't be supporting a patent encumbered MP3 format for the audio tag, same as Firefox.

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>The image tag has worked fine without a "baseline" image format since the dawn of the web.

IE's historically poor support for PNG is probably the main reason so many sites still use GIFs where PNGs would be better. (Edit: And for that matter, as others have pointed out here, PNG was invented because the owners of the GIF patents threatened to sue the entire Internet.) Browser support for TIFF is an inconsistent mess.

In the case of the img tag, the most common browsers all supported two common formats pretty well (JPEG and GIF), so those two formats became the de-facto baseline image formats organically.

I think the situation with video is similar. If Firefox, Chrome, and Opera (the influential browsers used mainly by the early-adopter, techie crowd) all support one specific codec for HTML5 video, that will become the de-facto baseline video format organically.

TIFF itself is an inconsistent mess :/

Were you there at the dawn of the web? I wasn't, but it's my understanding that GIF caused a ton of legal problems.

The img element has baseline formats. GIF/JPEG pretty much from the start and now also PNG. If these formats were not there the img element would never have worked.

If using a baseline format was their real argument they wouldn't be supporting a patent encumbered MP3 format for the audio tag, same as Firefox.

The "if you don't fight every battle at once, you have no morals to fight any battle" angle is bullshit. It's agenda-driven juvenile sophistry, and the real world doesn't work like that.

And while I find the WebM initiative questionable (h264 is technically superior and widely supported already), I find it unbelievably boring (and predictable) how it has become a proxy for the iPhone/Android fight. I doubt the Android team had any bearing whatsoever in this decision, and every Android handset out there is just as screwed by the lack of hardware decoding.

Suddenly boring zealots like Gruber and Siegler are experts on web standards and video codecs. What a depressing day. Seriously.

That's just petty nitpicking, the h264 patent threat in much more immediate and substantial so an alternative is needed specially since we are at the beginning of this shift and setting open standards now will save a lot of heartache in the future.

Its not petty nitpicking, its their entire argument. Including H.264 doesn't in any way prevent WebM from becoming the more mainstream standard. Except for the fact that likely more people would choose to use H.264 over WebM so they don't have to re-encode their video catalog using inferior tools in an inferior codec. The "Video Startups" he's defending aren't being stifled under H.264's licensing fees. The fees exist but they're pretty much negligible to a video provider compared to any other cost they are incurring. If they are really concerned for the poor video startup give them options to use the best tools for their need.

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