Comment by gioele | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gioele | Hacker News Reader

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> Get rid of the W3C and let Mozilla and the Webkit project define the web moving forward; they've done a great job so far.

The standardization of required codecs for the `<video>` element is indeed a wonderful accomplishment by the non-W3C HTML5 WHATWG.

Seriously, a third-party neutral organization will always be needed. Who will you appeal to when the main companies start having different ideas about something? Another thing that organizations like W3C or IETF do is to provide some kind of shelter from patents and similar problems.

We can discuss about the efficacy of such shelters and about the ability to mediate between different options, but the web is definitely under a better situation than wireless telephony, a field where company-run consortiums decide standards and "settle" disputes.

Who will you appeal to when the main companies start having different ideas about something?

No one. If the browsers refuse to agree on something (codecs being a good example), there's nothing that anyone can do about it. Just say "no standard is possible in this area" and move on.

OTOH, if two or more major browsers agree on the syntax and semantics of a feature, let's issue it as a standard (and de-prefix it) ASAP.

Speaking of `<video>`, i came across a site today that used <embed src="foo.wav">. As long as video and audio formats are loosely specified, we could've used the existing syntax and existing browser infrastructure (you still can't disable HTML5 audio/video in Chrome[1] for e.g. data cap reasons)

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1. http://crbug.com/50132

The irony is that <embed> was never a standard (unlike <object>); if you believe the W3C fans then you must be evil to use it. But it works, and has always worked, better than any of the alternatives. I hear with html5 they've given up and declared it part of the standard.

The "they" that "gave up" is a different group of people than the "they" who thought it was evil, by the way.

The current group working on the contemporary HTML living standard just describes reality, by and large, so there was never really any doubt that "embed" would be part of the standard when we started back in 2004.

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