After thinking about things and reading comments about the Ogg removal from HTML5 specs, I don't think I'm as upset as I used to be. Yes corporations managed to weasel their way in and pressure the W3C to remove the Ogg format from HTML5, most likely to keep up their own DRM, but I think there's more to it than that. 

One, nothing is preventing Ogg from being used as an object embedded in a website, simply put having Ogg in the spec never forced any format to be used.  This leads to another thought. The spec never forced any format to be used. So Ogg could have been included in the spec and Nokia could still use their DRM-laden formats. From what I believe and I think, the Ogg inclusion in the HTML5 spec only provided for a media format to be easily included into websites. This in itself is not bad at all, but I guess threatened Nokia and Apple enough to want it removed. I'm unsure as to what effect removing Ogg from the final spec will do, but it'd be interesting to wait and see what turns out. It's early enough that for all we know Ogg may sneak its way back in...but I'm not holding my breath.

Tags: w3c, ogg, html

I was reading this article about Nokia and Ogg music/video codec. For those of you who don't know, Ogg  is an open source music/video codec. Nokia is petitioning to the W3C, (the World Wide Web Consortium) who makes the standards for web languages like CSS and HTML, not to include Ogg in the HTML v5 standard. Their reason?  Ogg is proprietary and DRM is neccessary. First off, Ogg is NOT proprietary. It is open source. Second DRM is a horrible idea in itself, and the idea gets even worse on the web.  DRM is prorprietary as well and the web should not become such. The proprietary format of DRM is the primary reason DRM should be excluded from standards.

Fortunately, the W3C is known to be very much against proprietary standards so whether they will actually listen to such an argument from Nokia is very much debatable. The W3C insistance on anti-propietary standards as well as not licensing its standards is admirable in my opinion. If only more companies and groups could follow the same base. Standards should be based on the format's merits, not  to please Nokia, Hollywood, etc.

Ironically, Nokia also produces a Linux TabletPC...wait, isn't Linux open source?

Nokia to W3C: Ogg is proprietary, we need DRM on the Web [boingboing.net]

UPDATE:  Sadly, the W3C seems to have given into the pressure and removed Ogg from HTML v5.

Removal of Ogg Vorbis and Theora from HTML5: An Outrageous Disaster [rudd-o.com]

Ogg Vorbis / Theora Language Removed from HTML5 Spec [slashdot.org]

Tags: thoughts, links, nokia, w3c, opensource, news