[whatwg] Chipset support is a good argument

[Ian Hickson]

On Mon, 6 Jul 2009, Jonas Sicking wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 5, 2009 at 8:14 PM, Ian Hickson<ian at hixie.ch> wrote:
> > On Mon, 6 Jul 2009, Silvia Pfeiffer wrote:
> >>
> >> It's not the standard alone that makes it happen. The standard is for 
> >> the general market neither a necessary nor a sufficient requirement 
> >> for uptake. However, for the individual vendor, a standard and the 
> >> perception that the market is adopting it will be a sufficient 
> >> requirement to make a decision to create a product. Lacking the 
> >> standard, just the perception that the market is adopting makes 
> >> taking that decision just that much harder.
> >
> > I don't buy it. Nobody bases their business decisions on what specs 
> > say, they base them on what their customers and potential customers 
> > say they are going to spend money on. (Or the equivalent in the 
> > relevant market.)
> 
> It's not the spec by itself that affects business decisions. It's the 
> people that back the spec that does. Having names like W3C, Mozilla, 
> Opera, Google, and the many other parties participating here officially 
> get behind a HTML spec that endorses Theora sends a signal that this 
> isn't just a buzz word, but something that is likely to stick around. 
> Especially in the context of what the future of the web is going to look 
> like.
> 
> Even better would be if we can get names like Apple and Microsoft to 
> endorse this too, but I don't think it stands and falls by having these 
> endorsements right now. Especially since so far I see no reason that 
> couldn't come later.

Theora is already being endorsed by Mozilla, Opera, and Google; I don't 
think the incremental benefit of having the W3C spec mention Theora would 
offset the loss of having the spec move away from describing consensus.

(For the same reason, I expect to split out the SQL stuff from Web Storage 
before Web Storage moves on. This seems like the same situation to me.)

-- 
Ian Hickson               U+1047E                )\._.,--....,'``.    fL
http://ln.hixie.ch/       U+263A                /,   _.. \   _\  ;`._ ,.
Things that are impossible just take longer.   `._.-(,_..'--(,_..'`-.;.'