Is their rewrite of everything else better? WebRTC itself is so young that a complete rewrite shouldn't be out of consideration if needed. Nobody wants to carry bad decisions over the years anymore.
> WebRTC itself is so young that a complete rewrite shouldn't be out of consideration if needed. Nobody wants to carry bad decisions over the years anymore.
That's partly true, but also one of the traps of discussing these things outside of the working groups in which they originate. You get new eyes on proposals, from people not caught up in the baggage of past discussions and maybe not as tired of discussing this topic ad nauseam so aren't as ready to settle for the first thing that comes along, but you also lose all the context of ongoing discussions and proposals.
And, of course, you can always rewrite to try to get the perfect spec, but at some point the rest of the world has settled on the thing that was only meant to be a temporary solution, and it's now so entrenched that it's not going anywhere. The real danger looming over any standards body is the perfect (or as he really said, le mieux -- just "the better") as the enemy of the good enough.
I think that perspective is shortsighted. It isn't that people want to carry over bad decisions. It's that everybody needs to follow the same standard, and it takes a while to get consensus among the many parties involved.
When Microsoft goes and pulls a Microsoft and completely ignores the W3C to implement their own standards, we are heading in the wrong direction. Only recently (IE 9+) did Microsoft start adhering to web standards and its been a relief.
This feels like they are abandoning that, and it's going to give me nightmares.
We're on the same side. But just having a 'standard' is not enough; it needs to fulfill it's purpose in the most useful way.
I'm by no means pro-MS, but they are not abandoning standards, they just proposed one. Google and Mozilla have implemented things their own way for the past half decade before any discussion had started, that doesn't preclude moving to a standard later on.
