Standards that Matter are Standards that Ship
HTML5 defines a <video> element.
There is an experimental build of Opera that supports Ogg Theora. There is an experimental build of Firefox that only supports video/ogg. The nightly builds of webkit support all the formats that are supported by QuickTime (which, by default, does not support Ogg Theora). Nokia apparently felt that the mealy mouthed “User agents should support Ogg Theora video and Ogg Vorbis audio” that was in the working draft at the time was too troublesome, and requested that the wording be deleted. Previously, Nokia wrote a position paper, which states:
Considering our requirements, we believe the widespread use of technically competitive, but not necessarily “free” open standards, such as H.264 for video and AAC for audio, would serve the community best. This would be fully aligned with the business model dominant in the digital video ecosystem.
Microsoft continues to be AWOL.
Ian temporarily removed the requirement, which generated a few messages in the W3C working group and a lot more messages on the WHATWG mailing list.
Meanwhile, Jackass 2.5 is available exclusively on SilverLight.
Fundamentally, Microsoft’s strategy is sound. Ignore standards that you find inconvenient, and focus on producing and enabling the production of content people want. While my humble site can’t compete with the likes of Jackass 2.5, I do have a few people who follow my site. I’ve switched my front page to HTML5 despite the fact that this means that MSIE7 will therefore ignore virtually all CSS. The page validates modulo an acknowledged bug in the validator.
Perhaps if a few more HTML5 advocates did the same, people would eventually take notice.
P.S. If I had one request to the W3C and WHATWG working groups, it would be to ask that Ian’s conclusions about why a comprehensive spec later vs shipping something smaller sooner be revisited.