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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

Refusing to spec it would have just given us another two decades of Flash-equivalent hell. Developers want features, and you can either provide a road-map for making them cross-compatible and specified or you can refrain from doing so (at which point developers will do whatever, and then some private company will provide a closed-source solution, every browser will support it because it provides a service end-users want, and instead of any piece of the story being open the whole story will be closed and it'll be a quarter century before something standardized replaces it well enough to uproot the de-facto closed standard).

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> Refusing to spec it would have just given us another two decades of Flash-equivalent hell.

That's pretty much what we got with EME, since the technology relies on proprietary plugins. The only difference is that EME got a pointless stamp of approval from the W3C as supposedly a part of the "open" Web, even though there's nothing open about DRM-encumbered media.

Widevine is currently in the Chrome, Brave, and Firefox browsers. What are the odds we'd have gotten that (instead of a Chrome DRM solution, Firefox DRM solution, and Brave DRM solution) without the EME standard?

How's that different from the Flash browser plugin? Widewine is every bit as proprietary as Flash.

The w3c spec can be expected to put as small a subset of the client stack as possible into the black box, whereas a proprietary API would try to pull in as much as it can, aiming to eventually usurp the entire client. Remember silverlight?

Right. I think more likely than not Chrome would have implemented their own extension and it would have become the de-facto standard. Maybe Apple would have resisted and we would have two solutions.

If browser vendors want to create their own DRM extensions, then that's on them. But it seems to me that the W3C went too far in including DRM capability within the standards for the web.

The end result may be comparable, but I think the principle of it is important.

Principled men achieve nothing and make the word a worse place for both themselves and those whom they care about.

“principles” is another word for being irrational and nonstrategic.

It's on them and on web developers, who then have to deal with a balkanized client space without even the courtesy of a standard to allow the page to detect whether a given decryptor is available.

This is exactly what they ended up standarizing https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19553941

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