Web without Images?

Can you image what the web would be like without images? Or with images you could only view if you were using IE on a Windows machine, or Safari on a Mac? That’s bleak. The web works because of standards that ensure interoperability. Every compliant platform must support GIF and PNG files. It seems JPGs work every where too – they don’t need to they just do. That’s the point of a standard. Make sure everyone can get the basics and go the extra mile if you want with some format you consider better.

It seems Nokia and Apple have browbeat the standards body for HTML5 to exclude a foundation video format. In the following snip the lines stating with “-” were removed and replaced with the lines starting with “+”. I’ve removed most of the HTML fomatting codes contained in the original.

   Video and audio codecs for video elements

   User agents may support any video and audio codecs and container
   formats.

-  User agents should support Ogg Theora video and Ogg Vorbis audio,
-  as well as the Ogg container format. [THEORA] [VORBIS] [OGG]
-  
+  It would be helpful for interoperability if all
+  browsers could support the same codecs. However, there are no known
+  codecs that satisfy all the current players: we need a codec that is
+  known to not require per-unit or per-distributor licensing, that is
+  compatible with the open source development model, that is of
+  sufficient quality as to be usable, and that is not an additional
+  submarine patent risk for large companies. This is an ongoing issue
+  and this section will be updated once more information is
+  available.

The problem with the added text, the “+” stuff, is that the Ogg Theora video and Ogg Vorbin audio formats do everything asked of a codec in the “+” stuff. In essence they’ve replaced a “should” recommendation (where should means you ought to but don’t have to) with a paragraph explaining what they’d like to see in a codec – except the codec they removed fits all of the criteria mentioned.

For some discussion on this matter see this post that gives some background to the reasons why OGG fits the requirements and speculation as to why Nokia and Apple have, so far sucessfully, lobbied against it.