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> I don't expect Tim Berners-Lee to agree to this, given he was the one who championed DRM at W3C in the first place. The W3C is in a somewhat awkward place, r
by gsnedders 11y ago
> I don't expect Tim Berners-Lee to agree to this, given he was the one who championed DRM at W3C in the first place.
The W3C is in a somewhat awkward place, really. To some degree, the W3C is beholden to its member organisations, and if they want to do something it frequently happens. That said, it's easier to refuse to work on something than to work on something the majority of members don't want (HTML comes to mind there!).
> Also, I don't expect Mozilla to do anything useful, given they went along with it so easily. But then, I haven't expected anything much of Mozilla in a long while.
I think people vastly overestimate how much influence Mozilla actually has. Look at how long Mozilla held out against H.264, and all that did was cause them to lose marketshare (because plenty of HTML video simply wouldn't play in Firefox) with no affect on the web as a platform.
- chris_wot 11y agoSort of makes me wonder about why people give money to Mozilla if they have such little influence.
- acdha 11y agoMozilla has influence, not control. That doesn't mean they're not valuable for keeping things from being even more skewed by e.g. being the only non-DRM vendor in the room. The HTML5 video situation is a bit complicated, too, as H.264 was simply better across the board: standardization, quality, speed, tooling, hardware support, etc. There was only one reason to choose WebM and that was the belief that it might not be covered by patents, which mote optimistism than something you could be rely on. That point really needs to be fought in the next generation or two where you aren't waiting until the contest is over before getting started.