Conventional Wisdom
February 1st, 2009
The HTML5 spec adds a lot of new features. The conventional wisdom is that standards bodies are a bad place for innovation. It’s not clear whether the HTML5 is a demonstration of this phenomenon. It’s certainly over-rotated toward features found in Opera, Apple Safari, and Google Chrome, while too little applies to Internet Explorer. Mozilla is somewhere in the middle. If you look at participation and input into the document, this makes some sense.
After meeting with some HTML5 principals, I’m convinced that there’s work to be done that isn’t so tied to all these new features, and doesn’t throw away the excellent documentation of de facto standards in HTML5. The goal is to get consensus on a document that improves life for cross-browser web authors as soon as possible, without spending time on features that only apply to small portions of the market, proprietary devices, wrappers for patent-encumbered media players, and other products of closed development processes.
February 2nd, 2009 at 2:41 am
So what’s WHATWG’s role in the standardization process then? Does unaccepted invitation of MS mean failure of this working group and thus royalty-free AV codecs standardization is jeopardized?
Thanks Rob for clarifying the issue.
February 2nd, 2009 at 12:56 pm
Unfortunately, the WHATWG document does nothing for royalty-free AV codecs at this point.