[whatwg] Removal of Ogg is *preposterous*

[L. David Baron]

On Tuesday 2007-12-11 17:51 -0600, David Hyatt wrote:
> SHOULD is toothless.  It carries absolutely no weight.  I don't think it's 
> appropriate for such weak language to be in the HTML5 spec.  It should 
> either be a MUST (which is inappropriate at this juncture for reasons that 
> Dave Singer. Ian Hickson and myself have posted about in previous messages) 
> or just not be mentioned at all.

I disagree that SHOULD is toothless.  A SHOULD is something that you
should do unless you have a good reason not to:

# 3. SHOULD   This word, or the adjective "RECOMMENDED", mean that there
#    may exist valid reasons in particular circumstances to ignore a
#    particular item, but the full implications must be understood and
#    carefully weighed before choosing a different course.
  -- http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2119.txt

In this case, most implementors following the SHOULD and
implementing Theora might help companies whose concern is submarine
patents become more comfortable about shipping Theora, especially if
some of the implementors are companies similar in size or wealth to
those non-implementors.

-David

-- 
L. David Baron                                 http://dbaron.org/
Mozilla Corporation                       http://www.mozilla.com/