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I wouldn't have said they're forcing their ideology onto the web; it's more that they're forcing the web's ideology onto their users.
by weavejester 17y ago
I wouldn't have said they're forcing their ideology onto the web; it's more that they're forcing the web's ideology onto their users.
- blasdel 17y agoThe web's ideology is to not give a shit -- no baseline content types were ever specified for <img> or <object> or <embed>
- slater 17y agoYes, and "not giving a shit" gave us the fun we had with GIF89 (Will Compuserve shut down the web?!?), various incompatible video formats (Real, AVI, etc.), so this time around, giving a shit might save us from having to go thru all that again.
- blasdel 17y agoThe LZW GIF patent trolling was from Unisys (It was a submarine patent for Compuserve), and it only affected encoders -- it didn't threaten the web in any way. The video wars were because [Apple, MS, Real, Macromedia, Sun] were all trying to compete with each other using crap products that conflated [Branding, Plugin, Container Format, Codec] in a mash of uselessness. Flash won not because it had the same codecs on all platforms, the plugin was customizable the same way on all platforms, and the end-user branding was all yours to theme. The most interesting part of <video> is not codecs or containers, but the full + uniform control and customizability via its Javascript API. The only reason there is any problem at all is because Mozilla is refusing to expose access to QT / DirectShow / GStreamer.
- weavejester 17y agoThis is true, but I wonder whether this would have been the case had more image formats been patent-encumbered. The web is a product of open standards and formats, and Firefox is attempting to apply that ideology to HTML5 video formats as well.