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HTML5: compliance shouldn’t require support

Seems like the whole thing about HTML5 and video/audio formats is not done yet, three years after my cursing at Quassel due to qt-webkit because Qt-Webkit decided to bring in GStreamer to support HTML5 video.

This time, the issue is with both Firefox and Thunderbird, both of which come with a webm USE flag that, if disabled, make them fail to build.

I start to wonder, why people insist that for HTML5 compliance you have to support viewing the video? All that you got to do is be able to parse the element and act on it; showing a “This content is not available with your current browser” is quite fine, if I don’t want WebM support!

No technical content for today, it’s Sunday and I’m fighting with getting Thunderbird to work.

Comments 4
  1. Not sure this warranted a blog rant. The build failure is not a policy issue, it’s a simple bug where defines have been missed or incorrectly used in the source. I’m almost certain the issue you’re hitting was fixed in trunk in the past couple of weeks.

  2. Something I’ve noticed in a few places lately. “We know how we want things to work. We want them to work that way enough that we’ll actively make it difficult for you to do things any other way.”It goes hand in hand with only seeing the world from a certain vantage point; other use cases get either passive missed or actively disregarded out of convenience.Don’t mind me; I’m only bitter about udev. I now have three systems I can’t risk rebooting until I either A) learn and unmask dracut, B) learn how to use genkernel, or C) hand-maintain an initramfs, because someone upstream decided to actively make things difficult for people in borderline use cases.I had a conversation with a Wayland advocate the other day. I remarked that Wayland likely wouldn’t be able to handle mixed-DPI systems, and got a “DPI? Wait, people still use that?” response. Yeah, people do. And it’s going to get even more important as things like eInk displays get mixed with LED flatpanels in heterogeneous multimon setups.*grouses*BTW, my enttools project is coming along. Anything entropyd can do, I can easily envision how to bolt that functionality on to entmesh. I’m starting with learning Autotools. Just got things set up to use autoconf and automake. Need to clean things a little better (config.h.in doesn’t seem to include project metadata; I saw it in there once, but haven’t since. Still learning…) Anyway, you can follow it at https://github.com/mikemol/

  3. Yeah that’s one issue (udev), although for my side what I’m going to do — even though none of my systems have split @/usr@ (I don’t host Portage tree and distfiles there though! — is migrating to mdev instead (part of BusyBox). Given the kind of experimentation I’m doing with Busybox for “my current project”:https://blog.flameeyes.eu/2… I’m considering using most of BusyBox for the init scripts of my servers.Thanks for the link, I’ll gladly take a look at your project during the week, and if I have some polishing for the autotools I’ll send it your way!

  4. I appreciate any help I can get with the Autotools help. :)And re mdev…Walter Dnes (who’s been active on the gentoo-user list) has been putting a lot of work into getting mdev lined up as a manageable replacement for udev for some circumstances.My own systems pretty much all have /usr and /home on top of a raid5 volume, on top of LVM, or on top of LVM on top of raid5. It’s a combination of habit and preference; I get better disk performance with RAID, and having a couple busy I/O apps running in the background doesn’t kill I/O for most other purposes.(Also, your ‘preview’ button seems broken to me. Might be adblock, dunno. Running Chromium on x86_64…)

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