Mozilla, as an organization and product, has made implementing and developing open standards a core part of its mission from the beginning. But what is so important about standards?
I was listening to a presentation by Mitchell the other day, and one phrase in particular stood out: “Standards compliance is important because it ensures the portability of my data”. We don’t expend huge amounts of time and effort on open standards and standards compliance because of marketplace pressure. Open standards are a guarantee that the documents and data that our users are reading and writing today will continue to be available to us permanently in the future. Open standards are an essential service to the users of Firefox and to the web as a whole.
This is why Mozilla has spent so much effort implementing open video and the <video> element in HTML. And this is why open video is fundamentally better for users than Flash video or even patent-encumbered formats such as H.264.
