[whatwg] on codecs in a 'video' tag.

[Bjoern Hoehrmann]

* James Graham wrote:
>I think you are mistaking a requirement for all UAs with one for UAs that 
>support the display of images. For UAs that support the display of images, 
>authors rely on GIF, JPEG and PNG support being avaliable. The specifcation 
>should reflect the reality that any UA with image support that intends to work 
>on the web must support these formats.

Any mass-market user agent that "intends to work on the web" must
support some recent version of Adobe Flash, XMLHttpRequest, SSL,
TLS, IDNs, Cookies, HTTP Basic Auth, a broad range of character
encodings, some subset of CSS, XSLT 1.0, a range of URI schemes,
and many other things. Why should some of these be called out in
the "HTML specification", and if only some of them, why bother
with that at all?

And what if, say, some consortium of mobile solution provides agree
on additional required features, should those also be re-iterated
in the "HTML specification"? Clearly it does not help mass-market
browser vendors at all if you tell them to support GIF images; and
if the specification requires all of, say, GIF, <canvas>, and some
socket-based network API, how would that help authors? They would
not be helped in their decision what they can use. So, who's this
for?
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