I came across an article today (which can he found here) that said that the team drawing up the spec for HTML 5 are dropping the open-source video codec, Ogg Theora, which was hopefully going to become the standard because Apple was opposed to it, and instead wanted to implement their own H.264 codec, which, surprise, surprise, is a proprietary codec with certain licensing issues.
They have now decided to leave the video codec in the spec undefined, thus opening up the market to do pretty much anything they want. And we all know where that can lead.
Now, in order to support all browsers out there, a developer would need to have video content which supports both codecs, and then dish them out depending on what the browser supports.
Since the beginnings of the Internet, there have been conflicting technologies and specs competing for dominance like this. It would be nice if for once, everyone sat down and put aside their differences and came up with a common standard.
As a developer, this issue hits home particularly hard. Every web developer in the world is painfully aware of the headache caused by having to write web sites and applications that work equally well in Internet Explorer as well as Firefox, and then there are still all the other browsers with their own idiosyncrasies.
Maybe one day I might be able to code a web app and it will just work in all browsers, but that is certainly in the very distant future.
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