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Comment by ZeroGravitas | Hacker News Reader

A lively discussion, but most seem to miss the fact that the spec did require Theora (though not exclusively, just as a baseline to ensure interoperability) and Apple, with a little help from Nokia, had it removed from the spec because they refused to implement it.

So if Apple aren't the right people to complain to, I don't know who is. (Probably if Microsoft had implemented Theora then it would have been added back to the spec, as Apple would have been in a clear minority then, so complain to them too).

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The working group tasked with creating HTML5 has a charter that defines what are they supposed to work on and deliver. The codec of the content served through the video tag is outside of the scope defined in said charter. Apple, among others, have argued only that. What Microsoft could have done might have had impact on the outcome of h.264 vs. Theora, but it would not have changed the HTML5 specification.

Can you actually point to Apple arguing that about the charter scope? I recall them arguing that Theora was not efficient enough, that it didn't have sufficient hardware support, that it had patent issues and probably a few other arguments. I don't remember them ever making that specific point about the HTML5 charter.

Unfortunately I cannot off the cuff cite a source (if I find one I'll add a link to it, though). I can tell you the context in which I came across this. A couple of months ago there was a story that Adobe were "sabotaging" HTML5 - in reality it was Larry Masinter, Adobe's representative in the HTML WG, arguing that the canvas API falls outside of the charter of the working group. In one of the blogposts in defense of Adobe's position the author quoted similar objections that Apple and Microsoft have made regarding <audio> and <video> codec support when HTML5 was still in transition from WHATWG to W3C.

Apple have most certainly expressed concerns about Theora's performance and patent situation and I'm sure they still have them. However, those concerns were pertinent when HTML5 was being developed by WHATWG, because WHATWG are not limiting the scope of any work they do. That's not the case with W3C's HTML WG.

I think you could throw Google's name on the list there as well. Ian Hixie says:

>Google ships both H.264 and Theora support in Chrome; YouTube only >supports H.264, and is unlikely to use Theora until the codec improves >substantially from its current quality-per-bit.[1]

If the most popular video destination on the web continues to use H.264, then Theora adoption is a little less meaningful. (but still meaningful)

[1]: http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-Jun...

I don't really mind Youtube (or Apple Keynotes, Quicktime Movie Trailers etc.) not using royalty-free codecs that much. If every web decision was made through the lens of "is this image format suitable for Flickr", or "is this text encoding suitable for Wikipedia" then you'd end up with a very strange kind of web. Youtube seems to be regularly predicted to kill the internet as a whole anyway due to its size and popularity, with or without Theora.

If anyone is going to make extra work for themselves by using multiple codecs, or be subject to licence fees then it should be the giants of the web, not folk uploading videos of their cats to their blog (a demographic for whom Theora is a perfectly good solution if it was supported by Apple and Microsoft).

I agree with you. But even so, wouldn't a lot of people (everyone using firefox/Opera) then be unable to use youtube? When you have such an amazingly high profile site that is incompatible with major browsers, isn't that a bad thing? I guess you just fall back on flash.

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