[whatwg] A possible solution to the submarine patent issue (was: Re: So called "pre-exising use by large companies")

[Henri Sivonen]

On Dec 12, 2007, at 21:08, Manuel Amador (Rudd-O) wrote:

> The browser can just send an Accept: application/ogg, video/mpeg,  
> mime/type
> and the server can decide which file to serve, and if no content type
> satisfies that, then the server returns the appropriate HTTP  
> response which
> should make the browser look the codec up in a registry.


HTTP content negotiation has various problems that I'm not going to  
elaborate on here.

Instead, the HTML5 spec draft has a mechanism where the server (in the  
HTML5 document) advertises what it has to the browser and the browser  
chooses based on its knowledge of its decoder capabilities.

Please see the spec:
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/#location

You can find test cases here:
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/test/moz/video-selection/

-- 
Henri Sivonen
hsivonen at iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/