What happens when Mozilla, Microsoft and Opera get together under Douglas Crockford's moderation?

A very interesting conference that's available from Yahoo!. Douglas Crockford's introduction is worth the watch in itself but the others also have very interesting things to say.

Chris Wilson from the IE team and Mike Shaver from Mozilla are all about conciliation and doing the right thing for the Web to continue to be the platform of choice for the killer applications of the future. Encouraging. Mike even had nice things to say about IE7 (yes, you read that right).

Håkon Lie was more trying to pitch his product (and gently bashing IE) but still made an interesting case for a standard <video> tag that works without any kind of plug-in. The interesting part was the codec part and he's advocating for the adoption of Ogg. While I'm convinced that having a patent-free format is good for some applications (he cites Wikipedia), I think such a tag should be open to any codec, using a "type" attribute that gives the MIME type of the contents (like <script> and other tags already do). Although from a personal point of view (in other words this is in no way the Microsoft view) I think DRM are a failed attempt at preventing piracy that ultimately only bothers legitimate users, it remains a fact that a large part of the media industry still requires it and it is irrealistic to think that a <video> tag could be widely adopted if it doesn't take that aspect of things into account.

Finally, Apple's attitude was really revealing. Microsoft has often been (and sometimes rightfully) accused of arrogance, but replying to an invitation from Douglas Crockford "we are busy writing software" just redefines the term. Nicely done.

Watch the video at:
http://ajaxian.com/archives/browser-wars-mozilla-ie-opera-join-up-for-a-panel-discussion

UPDATE: A discussion on Ajaxian about the <video> element proposal:
http://ajaxian.com/archives/opera-element-proposal