Understanding W3C Candidate Recommendations and Patent Commitments

François Daoust, W3C staff member and co-chair of the Web Developer Experience Community Group, discusses the origins of the W3C, the browser standardization process, and how it relates to other organizations like TC39, WHATWG, and IETF. This episode covers a lot of ground, including funding through memberships, royalty-free patent access for implementations, why implementations are built in parallel with the specifications, why requestVideoFrameCallback doesn't have a formal specification, balancing functionality with privacy, working group participants, and how certain organizations have more power.

François explains why the W3C hasn't specified a video or audio codec, and discusses Media Source Extensions, Encrypted Media Extensions and Digital Rights Management (DRM), closed source content decryption modules such as Widevine and PlayReady, which ship with browsers, and informing developers about which features are available in browsers.

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