Le 3 mars 2007 à 20:29, Håkon Wium Lie a écrit :
Finally, I think open formats are better than closed formats. The
standards we write should not be neutral on this. Perhaps we should
not name specific formats, however, only require that codecs are
freely available for use across all platforms?
Open formats by their nature give more freedom to developers and
minimize economical constraints of implementation. As you said
mandating a format gives the risk to make a specification completely
irrelevant. Though even if we can update specifications, it doesn't
mean that is that easy.
It's what I usually call "the consequences of the first times".
When we define something which is largely deployed, it becomes very
hard to fix depending on the ecosystem. It's exactly like biology.
For the Web, if the number of *new* documents produced each year is…
10 times bigger than the *whole* legacy content of the previous
years, then we can mandate things somehow. But if the number of *new*
documents is only 10% of the legacy content, the renewal rate is not
quick enough to make changes.
Requiring a free codec could be seen as reasonable but could have
consequences on the whole food chain too. Imagine that the specs
require only Open source browsers, that would have the same effect.
So what can we do?
Maybe, something in between. It could be required that the
implementations support at least a format which has one free codec.
As it will encourage but not forbid.
--
Karl Dubost - http://www.w3.org/People/karl/
W3C Conformance Manager, QA Activity Lead
QA Weblog - http://www.w3.org/QA/
*** Be Strict To Be Cool ***
