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HTML5 Dropping Ogg Video
HTML 5 will no longer specify Ogg Theora as its video codec, the Google employee who maintains the burgeoning web-coding standard has announced. Ian Hickson wrote on Monday that he was reluctantly dropping the open standard due to opposition from Apple, and said the rival H.264 codec could also not be specified due to opposition from other browser vendors. This means HTML 5 will not specify a single codec for web development.
It’s a shame - I really liked the idea of open-source, plugin-free video in broswers; but if these kinds of disputes keep cropping up, we may not see HTML5 video at the top of its game. By having Ogg baked into some browsers and H.264 into others, HTML5 becomes more complicated, and if the past five years of browser-compatibility issues have taught us anything, it’s that having a definitive, simple standard makes for less headaches.
