[whatwg] Reasons for moving Ogg to MUST status (was Re: HTML 5, OGG, competition, civil rights, and persons with disabilities)

[Manuel Amador (Rudd-O)]

> That's not unreasonable, but you have yet to give a solid technical
> reason for reverting to the old text,

Reasons to put the Ogg tech suite back on the spec:

- it's Free (who here hates beer or freedom?)
- it's patent-unencumbered (this is a FACT)
- it's technically very good (Theora) or even superb (Vorbis and FLAC)
- it's widely available and readily installable
- it's being integrated in popular Web browsers RIGHT NOW
- it enables little guys to produce content at minimal cost

COME ON, what other reasons do you need?

> so far your only argument is that ogg should be kept because it is
> FOSS, which on its own is insufficient.

I just gave you N more reasons.

> As far as wording goes using the word "SHOULD support" is far too
> weak for HTML5, as SHOULD is relatively
> meaningless, a much better requirement is that the wording be "MUST
> support ..."; this is a sensible as
> having a spec that says "SHOULD support ogg/vorbis and ogg/theora" is
> fairly useless -- all that will happen
> is that browser vendors (Apple, Mozilla, Opera, etc) will once again
> be in a position where the spec's wording
> means nothing and we end up with yet another standard which is not
> tied to whatever becomes the actual
> de facto standard, as implemented by the majority browser.  This is
> much worse for site compatibility for every
> other browser as it then becomes necessary to determine what the de
> facto standard actually *is*.

This is not the year 2000. Mozilla and Opera are embedding Theora video.  
That's a user base large enough to force the rest of the players to get with 
the program.

Solid technical, philosophical and practical reasons to move Ogg to MUST.
-- 

	Manuel Amador (Rudd-O) <rudd-o at rudd-o.com>
	Rudd-O.com - http://rudd-o.com/
	GPG key ID 0xC8D28B92 at http://wwwkeys.pgp.net/

When one burns one's bridges, what a very nice fire it makes.
		-- Dylan Thomas
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