Why HTML5 Media is not Enough • Hacker News Board

Re: Why HTML5 Media is not Enough

#11

Post by BrendanEich » Thu, Dec 01, 2011, 9:49 PM UTC

TomOfTTB wrote: post #8

nddrylliog wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course, at ofmlabs we all want sink.js to be made unnecessary as soon as possible! It's just a pragmatic solution when you want to make an audio demo and cannot wait 3 years for the browser implementors to reconcile :) In the long term, we have been participating in the W3C Audio WG, and discussing with various folks at Google and Mozilla, to try and understand where the debate is going. Robert O'Callahan's MediaS…

I have no criticisms for sink.js my comment was more on the philosophical side. The danger in a solution like sink.js is it becomes "good enough" until people need more than it can provide. Then they turn to the APIs and end up dealing with fragmentation. If you think about it that's exactly what happened with IE circa Version 5. The one good thing IE did was make it possible to develop for one browser. What the indu…

You're right about IE5 (then 6) stagnating, but the predicate there was Microsoft's OS monopoly and browser tying. No such condition today -- we have a much more competitive browser market, and no browser can afford to self-stagnate.

Roc says he is nearly done with MediaStreams and if that looks good to enough people on the standards bodies, or really among the browser implementors, then it'll go forward.

Re: Why HTML5 Media is not Enough

#12

Post by BrendanEich » Thu, Dec 01, 2011, 10:26 PM UTC

fr0ggerz wrote: post #10

tomlin wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Adobe sits and thinks about what the next steps are for Flash and web standards organizations sit and think about how to replicate what Flash does – understand the demand cycle. My point isn't that HTML5 sucks, it's that people see it as better than Flash – but it isn't, sadly. That isn't an evangelistic statement, it is a factual one. To push forward, we can't be ignorant. We (as a community) have to look at what Fl…

The point is both Adobe and the W3C are guessing. Think how much faster we could advance if it was put in the hands of the community. A community that constantly implements, gets feedback, re-implements, collaborates. You only have to look at three.js ( https://github.com/mrdoob/three.js/ ) and similar to get an idea of what can be built on a low-level API. [Edit: guessing, not second-guessing]

Having participated in web browser standards for 15 years, in good (competitive) markets and bad, I agree completely, without reservation even though perfection is not an option.

The developer community, especially with open source as practiced on github.com, is much better able to path-find better high-level models and APIs. Committees and individual browser vendors are less likely to find the right designs and get them codified as well or as quickly.

This is not inevitable. You could have a righteous hacker/designer at a browser company, whose API and implementation are so winning they sweep all before them. Great if this happens, but it's rare in my experience.

Thus the apparent paradox of low-level APIs and increasingly very fast JS engines enabling faster and better hacker-community-based de-facto standardization than even the modern browser vendors can achieve on average. Then the standards bodies ideally roll up de-jure standards based on uncontested winning designs.

We're in the midst of this, so it's hard to see it in full. It's also slower than some people want, but Flash was not built in a day, or a year, either.

Browser vendor "defection" (failure to cooperate in standards bodies on consensus standardization) is an ongoing threat. Competition as browsers merge with mobile and desktop/tablet OS front-sides (home screens) and app platforms is of course still required to keep standards bodies functional.

Re: Why HTML5 Media is not Enough

#13

Post by BrendanEich » Thu, Dec 01, 2011, 10:36 PM UTC

tomlin wrote: post #5

ceejayoz wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But isn't that exactly what Flash is? JS and the various browser APIs for media come with the browser. Flash doesn't necessarily. You can count on Chrome and Firefox having a media API, but not Flash.

At this point, can I count on a user having Flash over Chrome or Firefox? Today, I'd say that a user having Flash is a more reliable bet than them having Chrome/Firefox. And if they have Chrome, they have Flash. I get where you're going, but this conversation always gets dicey. People want Flash to die, so they sit around the campfire dreaming about why it is bad, but fail to see why it has succeeded thus far. If we…

Just a quick reply to your "I still can't allow a user to upload a video with a webcam using standard web technologies" point. I believe you can or soon will be able to upload video captured on a mobile device in Firefox for Android and the Android stock browser, using

See http://www.w3.org/TR/device-upload.

Re: Why HTML5 Media is not Enough

#14

Post by timc3 » Sat, Dec 03, 2011, 11:07 AM UTC

tomlin wrote: post #5

ceejayoz wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But isn't that exactly what Flash is? JS and the various browser APIs for media come with the browser. Flash doesn't necessarily. You can count on Chrome and Firefox having a media API, but not Flash.

At this point, can I count on a user having Flash over Chrome or Firefox? Today, I'd say that a user having Flash is a more reliable bet than them having Chrome/Firefox. And if they have Chrome, they have Flash. I get where you're going, but this conversation always gets dicey. People want Flash to die, so they sit around the campfire dreaming about why it is bad, but fail to see why it has succeeded thus far. If we…

Flash does not outperform every aspect of the alternatives. The standard flash browser plugin can't even provide frame accurate playback, something that can be done with the video tag in chrome, IE9, Safari and Firefox.

It does not out perform chrome's webgl, audio API, video decoding support, except in the cross platform support it offers.

The only benefit it has is that it Is common, but there can be version differences on feature support.