The latest rewrite of the Web’s mother tongue won’t recommend the use of specific audio and video encoding formats that could make it cheaper and easier for people to distribute multimedia content.
The major browser makers have been unable to agree on an encoding format they will support in their products, wrote Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).
via Browser vendor squabbles cause W3C to scrap codec requirement | Developer World – InfoWorld.
Just in case anyone needed reminding about whose side the browser makers are really on (that would be their own). Thing is this wasn’t some sort of complicated technical thing, just a matter of a bit of compromise that would benefit all users. Seems there’ll be none of that. Every vendor seems to have dug in until it just became too troublesome to resolve. We all lose. Sad.