Re: Beavis, Butheat & Freetards love the down-vote button

"the W3C can tell the DRM-mongers to fuck off and come up with their own solution"

Then that's exactly what they will do. It's what they ARE doing now. Happily.

The fact you want the W3C to tell people to "fuck off" shows you think they're the boss of the Web, there to push people around.

They tried this in the 90s and became a complete irrelevance. Netscape, Microsoft, Macromedia and others simply ploughed ahead adding whatever they needed, unwilling to wait 10 years for someone to give them permission to progress. Netscape 4 had multi-column support whilst IE4 supported embedded fonts. Both in the 90s.

The W3C would be a memory on the Web today if it weren't for a bunch of people working in the real world coming together and working on HTML5. In the end, they agreed to become part of the W3C, and that's the only reason the W3C regained some relevance. Perhaps if they'd stayed as the WHATWG, we wouldn't still be watching petty squabbles about codecs and DRM.

But the W3C is moving too slowly (not for the first time - CSS3 was born in the 90s), which is why we're now seeing browser makers roll out endles proprietary features. If you follow the MSIE blog, you'll know that barely a week goes by without some new proprietary CSS or Javascript feature being announced, such as the 3D manipulation of elements.

The W3C don't even support a video format, yet <video> remains part of the spec, and it's not harming the element being rolled out across the Web. That shows the cracks appearing, cracks that will eventually lead us to the same situation as before, where no one cares about the W3C, they get their specs from MSDN or Mozilla.

But if the W3C are happy to offer <video> without a codec (as they offered an <img> tag without any format support), why can't they also provide whatever generic mechnism is needed for DRM and leave the browser makers to implement whatever DRM system they want. Just nest a fallback element for failures.