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0 pointspcwalton7y ago0 comments

The W3C's failures pale in comparison to what I hear of the ISO MPEG process, in which companies compete to put as much of their patented technology in the codec standard as possible without any regard for coherence. ISO is worse than the W3C.

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3 comments · 2 top-level

rayiner7y ago· 1 in thread

ISO at least still releases real standards with multiple implementations. Web standards by contrast have basically become a pretense, as the actual standard is defined by Google’s implementation.

pcwaltonOP7y ago

I mean, to some degree that's true, but that's not anything the W3C can do anything about. It's just the nature of the browser market at this time.

As an example, C++, also an ISO standard, has notoriously few full implementations, and as a result C++ is largely defined by "what GCC/Clang accept" in practice.

tombert7y ago

It's even worse than that; the way you end up getting a license to these patented codecs (that are now part of the standard), you end up buying access to codec pools from groups like MPEG-LA. This isn't inherently bad, but the price of buying a license to these pools doesn't typically decrease, even when some (or most) of the patents in that pool expire.

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