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

[James Graham]

Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
> I have a hard time following you. Could you rephrase what pain it would
> solve, and why this is the best solution, if the HTML specification in-
> cludes documentation what you need in terms of explicit interaction with
> the document layer to produce a functional graphical web browser, except
> those things that cannot be included for some reason; and giving vendors
> of said applications a well-defined target? I can honestly think of no
> pain that would be solved by having the "HTML specification" recommend
> that certain types of web browsers implement the GIF image format.

The pain of having things that "everyone knows" are needed to make a useful HTML 
reading device but are not documented as such. A specification is documentation 
both of the language and what needs to be done to implement a UA to read it and 
I see no reason to arbitarily limit the scope to those parts that can be 
expressed in pure markup. As I mentioned there is also the problem of vendors 
punting on supporting parts of formats that everyone else supports. SHOULD 
requirements in HTML provide a little extra leverage when reporting these 
deficiencies as bugs.

In the case of image formats it's probably not overwhelmingly important (only 
because "everyone knows" what is needed; in the case of audio and video I think 
it is very important) but I can't see how it's harmful in the way you suggest.

In any case this discussion is probably not very useful.

-- 
"Eternity's a terrible thought. I mean, where's it all going to end?"
  -- Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead