[Advocacy] Vorbis and Theora Required MIME Types for SMIL 3.0 WD

[Shawn K. Quinn]

On Wed, 2007-07-18 at 20:16 +0100, Ivo Emanuel Gonçalves wrote:
> These are great news.  Unfortunately they put the old MIME type
> application/ogg.  As of recently, we (Xiph) decided [1] to go with
> video/ogg and audio/ogg+vorbis.

I think application/ogg makes more sense for having a generic type when
all that can be determined is "Ogg bitstream", as there will be cases
(such as Annodex) that don't completely and neatly fit into one or the
other. To be honest, this shows one of the shortcomings of MIME types
as well, as you only have (category)/(type) and you can't easily say
"this has two audio tracks, one in Vorbis, one in Speex, and one video
track in Theora" without having a MIME type that looks like Sanskrit.

> Hope they won't mind changing the spec in the future.  One annoying
> thing about W3C is that they rather leave bugs, issues, or errors in
> released specs instead of fixing them (see for instance XHTML 1.1 not
> allowing id in style element).

W3C released HTML 4.01 and CSS 2.1 that were mainly for errata.

> Anyhow, great news.  This will push more browsers to adopt our
> formats, making them work with <audio> and <video>, as well.

I still don't see what's so wrong with the more generic <object>; to me
<audio> and <video> are steps back towards the slippery slope of
<blink>, <marquee>, and <font>.

> It's a battle against time, really, because Apple (and probably Microsoft)
> are against adopting our formats for their browser(s). 

It's not in Apple's or Microsoft's best interests to do so. Microsoft
could *easily* have shipped whatever versions of Vorbis, Theora, Speex,
and FLAC with Windows Vista. Microsoft chose not to, and while sad, it
reflects Microsoft's business values and how everything revolves around
what's best for Microsoft, instead of what's best for the customer.

> And if they bring MPEG 4 (or WMV) video/audio support before Firefox,
> Opera, or Konqueror do it, we shall see web designers pushing for
> proprietary formats, instead.

And it's a shame that that's what it comes down to. Note also that
people are taking the "alpha" status of Theora quite literally as well
and staying away in droves. It is long since time to enlighten them that
Theora is usable today (along with the other Xiph.org codecs).

-- 
Shawn K. Quinn <skquinn at speakeasy.net>