Standardizing on either wouldn't have done nothing but dissociate the spec from reality.
So now web designers have to deal with incompatibilities introduced in the last century, as well as ones introduced in yet-to-be published specs.
What is the point of standards if everyone is going to ignore them? The HTML5 committee could have saved a lot of time by not writing the spec and instead concentrating on a free reference implementation. (When browser vendors have to implement a spec on their own, they are going to cut corners to make things easy. If they can just cut-n-paste from a reference implementation, they will probably just use that.)
What is the point of standards if everyone is going to ignore them?
That's the point. That's why that part was removed. If Theora had been mandated, Apple would have ignored it. If h264 had been mandated, Mozilla would have ignored it.
I'm not really sure how it's going to work in Chrome, though. The article says they are going to support both codecs. As a result it's up to browser which video source to choose. It's interesting whether it will pick the first source or the 'preferred' one (presumably, mp4). Is it possible to set the source preference in HTML? Like:
Whatever the authors of the reference implementation felt like writing. Just like all the major browsers that are supposedly "standards compliant", but without pretending to be something it's not.
(People don't want a standard saying how to play videos on the web. They want to be able to say <video src="foo.video"> and have it work for all their users, including those using free software.)
So now web designers have to deal with incompatibilities introduced in the last century, as well as ones introduced in yet-to-be published specs.
What is the point of standards if everyone is going to ignore them? The HTML5 committee could have saved a lot of time by not writing the spec and instead concentrating on a free reference implementation. (When browser vendors have to implement a spec on their own, they are going to cut corners to make things easy. If they can just cut-n-paste from a reference implementation, they will probably just use that.)