[whatwg] <video> element proposal

[Martin Atkins]

Lachlan Hunt wrote:
> Shadow2531 wrote:
>>
>> I think it'd be cool if the video element *just* supported theora.
> 
> Mandating support for a single specific video format like Theora would 
> be like requiring browsers to only support PNG for images.  Sure, Theora 
> has the major advantage of being (supposedly) patent free (or 
> royalty-free patents only), and thus more likely to be natively 
> supported in browsers than, say, MPEG, but it's not the only format. 
> Unfortunately, it's not even a widely used format in comparison with 
> other proprietary/patented formats.
> 
[snip]
> 
>> If it supports whatever the browser wants to implement, we'd have to
>> do like the following I think.
>>
>> <video src="test.wmv">
>>    <video src="test.mpg">
>>        <video src="test.ogg>
>>            I give up
>>        </video>
>>    </video>
>> </video>
> 
> Or simply use
> 
> <video src="test"><embed src="test"><!-- fallback --></video>
> 
> And use server-side content negotiation to determine the best one to send.
> 

Either way, one has to maintain a lot of different versions of the same 
content.

While I agree that mandating that it only support one format is a bad 
idea, I do feel that there should be a baseline format that all browsers 
*must* fully support, just as currently we know all browsers fully 
support GIF and JPEG.