Shelley Powers recently made a good faith effort to create a Formal Objection; however, to date I have not found a way to treat it as such. The concern is certainly valid, but we need to find a process for dealing with the issue, and this post is a part of the process for determining the process.

The concern is that Ian made a decision to remove two subsections in his draft HTML5 spec in which codecs would have been required and that such a decision was widely viewed as a decision by the W3C. It was not, in fact, a decision by the W3C, and as such it is not a subject to a Formal Objection. But I can’t escape the fact that the perception exists, and is widely held.

Before proceeding, I wish to compliment Ian for making a decision. This is not a topic with obvious answers. On one hand, I believe that marketplace should sort out the codecs situation. On the other hand I do not believe that the current draft contains enough information by itself to ensure interop.

Ian also took the opportunity to provide some insight into his decision making process. In doing so, he created an impression that Apple had exercised a unilateral veto. I believe that such an impression is unfortunate, counter-productive, and not in line with my understanding of either W3C or WHATWG processes. In particular, I actually believe that the accepted goal of the WHATWG was two complete and bug-free implementations in 2022. I do not believe that Apple’s participation is required to meet that goal. In particular, I believe that there are at least three implementations today which could form the basis for meeting that goal, with required codecs, namely the browsers produced by Mozilla, Google, and Opera. Nor do I believe that Ian has talked to anybody who can say with absolute certainty what Apple will or will not support by 2022, as I don’t believe that such a person exists.

That still leaves the matter of the public impression. I will start by saying that I feel no compelling need to correct the impression at this time. I believe that the correct way to address the mis-impression that the W3C Working Group has made a decision is to actually make a Working Group decision. Meanwhile, I am posting this publicly, both on my blog and on public-html. I harbor no illusion that it will be sufficient to correct the misunderstanding. If anybody feels so inclined, feel free to refer people to this.

For the Working Group to make a decision, we need something concrete to express an opinion on. Which means that we need some text, be it some sort of resolution or (my personal preference) some concrete spec text. My reasons for preferring the latter is that spec text is both more durable and less ambiguous than resolutions. I’m particularly skeptical about resolutions that take the form of “I think that somebody (other than me) should do the following” in general, and “make the editor do this (against his better judgment)” in particular.

At the present time, we (nominally) have two editors. This has been a continuing source of controversy, but overall has served us well, at least to get us to this point. It may, however, very well be the case that this is not the model that will get us to Last Call and beyond. We now seem to have at least three individuals who have made significant efforts to work within this system, and now feel that producing a document themselves may be a more productive use of their time:

So, ultimately, we may end up this month with four separate specifications. If this comes to pass, we may need to adopt naming conventions like the IETF’s: draft-author-docname. If we do so, I am fully confident that the W3C has the technical chops necessary to make this a smooth transition via HTTP redirects.

It is also my experience that such a situation won’t last long. Some efforts may merge, some may lose interest, and some may never make to the point where they have a first draft ready for consideration. In fact, we could end up determining that a benevolent dictator is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried (with apologies to Sir Winston Churchill).

If, when we get to the point where we are ready to go to Last Call, a number of competing proposals still remain, then we will have a vote. I fully recognize that a number of people would prefer technical superiority to win out over what they view as mere popularity contests, and these people are certainly encouraged to cast their vote in this manner. I will simply note that it is quite possible for two intelligent individuals with similar backgrounds and experience can come to different conclusions when presented with the same data. And we can all name standards that are “technically superior” that few follow. I, for one, would rather take part in the creation of a standard worthy of loving parody by the likes of Clay Shirky than to produce another such standard.

Returning to Shelley’s objection (even though it may not be end up being recognized as being a Formal one), I beg her indulgence as I would like to see how these various efforts play out in the upcoming weeks. Should one or more succeed and/or Ian changes his position, I would hope that she would consider voluntarily withdrawing her objection at that time.

Meanwhile I’ve reopened issue 7:video-codecs and opened issue 75:microsoft-review. I’ll be looking for owners for those two issues.

Related reading: authority, access, policy, support.