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Today, the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) is announcing that it’s completed its three-year quest to finalize the HTML5 specification.... But despite the fact that the specification is now feature complete, meaning nothing more will be added to it, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done before HTML5 reaches the finish line in 2014, and there are unanswered questions about how the group plans to deal with video, an essential part of the web that has yet to see any clear resolution. Implementation is everything.
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I'm building a startup on HTML5 (in particular, HTML5 audio), and the state of things is ugly for 1 reason:
Politics.
Here's a sample, just from the HTML5 <audio> element:
- IE refuses to implement open-standard codecs (e.g. OGG) because they are best served by making proprietary codecs popular in order to starve their non-commercial competition, Firefox. It becomes a check in the feature list, one that's missing from Firefox.
- Firefox refuses to implement MP3 audio and other commercial formats because they refuse to implement commercial codecs.
- Safari on iOS cripples HTML5 audio[^] because they would rather developers build native apps where Apple gets 30% purchase price.
- About the only one who is playing nice is Google. Their only fault is they lie: on Droid 2.2 devices, they lie reporting they support HTML5 audio when queried programmatically, but in reality they supported 0 audio formats. Reporting HTML5 audio support, but 0 audio formats, is useless and deceptive.
This is just a sample of the headaches I've had to deal with; the real state of HTML5 is much messier. Still better than the alternative, though.
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