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Comment by pedanticfreak | Hacker News Reader

Until the W3C officially adopts a royalty free codec as part of the HTML standard, Google and Mozilla should assume HTML video is dead. They might as well make the <video> tag inoperable by default. Just parse it and ignore it.

Of course, Google owns VP8. So they are pushing it so it might become a defacto standard that later gets officially adopted. Despite meeting the requirements to be part of the HTML spec, without the official backing of the W3C it is no different than any other out of spec extension to HTML.

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Maybe this is a dumb question, but what difference does it make what's in the spec? People will pick the browser that plays the videos they want to see over the one that follows the spec every time.

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/biz/2009/09/123_52401.h...

South Korea built vast infrastructure around IE6 and ActiveX. Just a year ago a full 60% of Korean traffic still came from IE6. Why? Because they relied heavily on features that were not in the spec that Microsoft deprecated and nobody else can or will implement.

An extreme example. But it highlights the importance of sticking to specs that can be freely implemented by anyone. Five years from now when MPEGLA decides to throw down the crap hammer do you want to have to keep around old Safari binaries just for sites that migrated to h264 while the rest of the web moved on?

I don't think it is the same thing. Unlike ActiveX, video can be re-encoded (fairly easily I guess if you are going to use 2016 technology).

That sounds like an argument for free and open formats in general more than an argument for strict obedience to the W3C, but I see your point.

At the time those Korean sites were built, I'm guessing there was no spec nor open alternative to do what they were trying to do.

The W3C (via the WHAT WG) did have a royalty free codec as part of the spec in Ogg Theora. It was removed because it became clear that key players (specifically Nokia and Apple) were refusing to implement it, spec or no. A spec that doesn’t match what people are willing to implement isn’t a very good spec.

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