[whatwg] Codecs for <audio> and <video>

[Sam Kuper]

2009/6/30 Peter Kasting <pkasting at google.com>:
> * I didn't say "5 years from Rec status"

No, you didn't; I was being generous. You said something much less
meaningful: "published with no dispute for 5 years". No dispute from
whom? Browser developers and web developers disputed aspects of
several of the standards under test in Acid3 during the 5 years
preceding its publication. Witness the divergence between different
browsers' implementations of ECMAScript and CSS; witness different
approaches taken by web developers to handle them; witness disputed
elements like <q> and <cite>.

> * Acid3 was meant to be an illustrative example of a case where the test
> itself was not intentionally introducing new behavior

Well, it was intentionally testing whether a browser implemented specs
accurately. In some cases, browsers had to have new behaviour added in
order to do so.

> or attempting to force
> consensus on unwilling vendors [...]

I quote Wikipedia again: "Microsoft, developers of the Internet
Explorer browser, said that Acid3 does not map to the goal of Internet
Explorer 8 and that IE8 would improve only some of the standards being
tested by Acid3.[20] IE8 scores 20/100 and has some problems with
rendering the Acid3 test page."[1]

Similarly with Acid2 (released April 13 2005):

"In July 2005, Chris Wilson, the Internet Explorer Platform Architect,
stated that passing Acid2 was not a priority for Internet Explorer 7,
describing the test as a "wish list" of features rather than a true
test of standards compliance."[2]

The point of specs is to define how things *should* be. They are, by
nature, idealistic. Implementation may not be perfect or universal.
This has to be acknowledged, but it does not justify dropping an item
from the spec that several major browser vendors are willing to
support and that other would probably be willing to support once fears
of submarine patents have dissipated.

Sam

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid3
[2] In July 2005, Chris Wilson, the Internet Explorer Platform
Architect, stated that passing Acid2 was not a priority for Internet
Explorer 7, describing the test as a "wish list" of features rather
than a true test of standards compliance.