justsomeguy Posted July 3, 2009 Share Posted July 3, 2009 For anyone planning for the future:XHTML2 has been cancelled:http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/07/03/1447237And, for anyone hoping to use the <video> element in HTML5, well, this is why we can't have nice things:http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/07/02/184251 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AElliott Posted July 3, 2009 Share Posted July 3, 2009 Well, it will still be possible to use <video>, but it seems that if you want to get it cross-browser now you'll need to keep two copies and use some JS or something to determine whether to give the browser in question H.264 or Theora. Disappointing though, it seems to be mostly Apple being unnecessarily paranoid about some hypothetical submarine patent in Theora. If they'd been a little more accommodating then we'd probably have Theora mandated (and that would be a nice thing for all).The other question I suppose is what side Microsoft ends up on when it decides to implement HTML5. Because if it and Firefox both support Theora, then that would be a pretty big incentive for most websites to standardise on that codec. But it is probably more likely they'll follow Apple in this case. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
justsomeguy Posted July 3, 2009 Author Share Posted July 3, 2009 Microsoft is refusing to support the <video> element at all. They want people using Silverlight instead. That's probably Apple's reason too, they want people to use Quicktime. There aren't any issues with using Ogg, Apple should know that. They're just using patent issues as their reason why they don't want to add it to Quicktime and use it by default. Here are the reasons posted to the mailing list by Ian Hickson: Apple refuses to implement Ogg Theora in Quicktime by default (as used by Safari), citing lack of hardware support and an uncertain patent landscape. Google has implemented H.264 and Ogg Theora in Chrome, but cannot provide the H.264 codec license to third-party distributors of Chromium, and have indicated a belief that Ogg Theora's quality-per-bit is not yet suitable for the volume handled by YouTube. Opera refuses to implement H.264, citing the obscene cost of the relevant patent licenses. Mozilla refuses to implement H.264, as they would not be able to obtain a license that covers their downstream distributors. Microsoft has not commented on their intent to support <video> at all.more: I considered requiring Ogg Theora support in the spec, since we do have three implementations that are willing to implement it, but it wouldn't help get us true interoperabiliy, since the people who are willing to implement it are willing to do so regardless of the spec, and the people who aren't are not going to be swayed by what the spec says.Going forward, I see several (not mutually exclusive) possibilities, all of which will take several years: 1. Ogg Theora encoders continue to improve. Off-the-shelf hardware Ogg Theora decoder chips become available. Google ships support for the codec for long enough without getting sued that Apple's concern regarding submarine patents is reduced. => Theora becomes the de facto codec for the Web. 2. The remaining H.264 baseline patents owned by companies who are not willing to license them royalty-free expire, leading to H.264 support being available without license fees. => H.264 becomes the de facto codec for the Web.When either of these happen, I will reconsider updating HTML5 accodingly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AElliott Posted July 3, 2009 Share Posted July 3, 2009 My understanding was just that Microsoft weren't commenting on supporting it yet. Which is fair enough really, as it is a draft standard. I didn't think they'd said they won't support it when the standard is published.I did see the Google commentary on Theora not being good enough quality for youtube, there was an interesting discussion in mailing lists in which a Firefox developer pretty much blew the arguments of quality out of the water in that they were good enough for most streaming situations (H.264 was still better than bleeding edge Theora, but it has been improving a lot recently). The Google dev in question seemed to agree it was probably true, but couldn't/wouldn't push it through. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
justsomeguy Posted July 3, 2009 Author Share Posted July 3, 2009 Yeah, Microsoft hasn't commented. Saying that they're refusing to support <video> is technically true, because they're refusing to say anything. If they were planning on implementing something like that I'm sure they would want to float that before they actually did it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ingolme Posted July 3, 2009 Share Posted July 3, 2009 I think I'll be sticking with HTML 4.01 for quite a long time. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bigsilk Posted July 9, 2009 Share Posted July 9, 2009 Word to Ingolme...Why can't we all just get along? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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