Dr Harry Halpin writing in the Guardian about the crucial crossroads that we have reached with the very real possibility of DRM mechanisms becoming encoded within HTML:
Most of us are simply happy to launch our browsers and surf the web without a second thought as to how the standards like HTML are created. These standards are in the hands of a fairly small set of standards bodies that have in general acted as responsible stewards for the last few years. The issue of DRM in HTML may be the turning point where all sorts of organisations and users are going to stop taking the open web for granted.
The Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) addition to HTML is effectively DRM with the blessing of the W3C. It’s bad for accessibility, bad for usability, bad for security, and as the Internet Archive rightly points out, it’s bad for digital preservation.
Here’s the chat I had with Jen and Doug about the prospect of DRM in browsers.
Bruce writes about a worrying trend in standards work:
Tossing a specification that you’ve written in-house, in secret and already implemented onto a table at W3C, saying “here, standardise this” as you saunter past isn’t a Get Out of Jail Free card for proprietary misdemeanours. And it isn’t standardisation.
Purely for my own benefit because I keep needing this URL, here are the current outstanding issues registered at the W3C for HTML5.
Hammering out the issues around standardising responsive images.
My petitions to the makers of markup.
Inside the troubled mind of HTML5.