[Wikipedia-l] Re: Theora and video policy...

Thu Jun 24 09:26:10 UTC 2004

Rowan Collins [IMSoP] wrote:
>  > The attitude some have taken against Theora reminded me of Mozilla
> 
>> developments attitude towards MNG, which led to its removal from the 
>> 1.4 trunk in favour of Flash (?!), Animated GIF (!!) and SVG.
> 
> 
> I know this is drifting off topic (oh, crap, I'm not even subscribed to 
> this list am I - there's too many!) but I did look through some of the 
> stuff on the MNG controversy. The first thing I want to say is - since 
> when has Mozilla, or *any* browser, or in fact any software distributed 
> by anyone other than Macromedia, been able to play Flash files!? I don't 
> know what's so "!!" about animated GIFs either, they may have recent 
> legal problems, but they've been the standard format since the dawn of 
> time.
> 

== Reply ==

    Wait, wait.  You know why there were exclamation marks?  Because 
those are not open-source and/or not free things.  Gerv, Greg and Glenn, 
the 3G as I call them, are wonderful people who did their best to make 
the code suitable for the “maintainers” needs and whims.  It can be well 
seen that those with power in the issue didn’t do anything to support 
the free and open solution, even worse, this has been said [1]:

| While these formats have some interesting features, I think it's
| worth considering removal of this decoder from the mozilla tree.
| Some of the reasons:
|
|   * mng decoder module is roughly the same size as all the other
|       image decoders and libpr0n logic combined.
|
|       Linux sizes:
|
|         261796  libimglib2.so
|         241492  libimgmng.so
|
|       MS-Windows sizes:
|
|         155024  imglib2.dll
|         170336  imgmng.dll
|
|   * mozilla integration is rather rough, partly due to a necko bug
|       (possibly fixed by darin's recent async changes) and partly
|       due to the lack of active, interested maintainers.
|
|   * animated gifs and flash (and possibly svg in the future) cover
|       much of the feature set of mng.  jng is a bit more interesting,
|       but not in ways that most people will care about.
|
|   * the formats are little used in the wild.
|
|   * the formats are not w3c recommended.
|

    While I agree that the sizes had to be worked on, quite some of 
those “reasons” are BS, to say the least.  For one, please, let’s take 
out PNG transparency support, CSS3 support and half of CSS2 — everyone 
develops under Internet Explorer anyway.

    It all went against the wish of at least 500 bugzilla voters and 
without a real notice, Pavlov chimed in with something like “Hi, I 
removed it from the trunk. Bye.” and never came back for more than a month.

    Decent reasons and well-thought filesize requirements (again though, 
what /is/ 120KiBs of a library these days?) were not stated for an 
unforgiveably long time.

== Readworthies ==

[1] http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=195280
[2] http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=18574

> But we don't have to worry about 
> that, because we're not proposing software to *process* any such media, 
> only distribute it.
> 

    A good point.

> Geez, I didn't realise this was going to be such a long message. 
> Hopefully it contains something for someone to think about...
> 

    I don’t have comments on the second part, it was interesting to 
read, too, and had good points.

-- 
R.