DRM vs Standards

Recently, the W3C has been making comments about the need to support Encrypted Media Extensions (EME).  Netflix announced that they have preliminary support for playing video using HTML5 on IE11.  It was previously announced that Google ARM-based Chromebooks supported Netflix HTML5 video.  It is amazing how many people don't understand what standards are.

The basic idea of a standard is to contain an agreed upon written specification.  The specification should have minimal ambiguities.  The goal of this is that you can have two different vendors inter-operate with each other.  If/when a third vendor comes along, they should just have to worry about implementing the written specification, and the inter-operating should be minimal.  Lets compare that with the new W3C "standard" that Netflix claims to support.

I use Linux.  I go back and forth between two different browsers: Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.  Both support the HTML5 "standard".  This means, as long as a webpage adheres to the standard, both of these browsers should work.  Lets take a tour of the Netflix site one these browsers.  What happened?  Nothing.  That's what happened.  So what did it not work?

Companies like Netflix lobbied for the inclusion of EME.  EME allows a browser to delegate the DRM functions to a program outside of the browser.  Since these programs are native, and not implemented in cross-platform technology (like HTML5 and Javascript!), the "decryption" of these videos is not supported on a majority (by number, not volume) of operating systems.  That means, even though Google Chrome fully implements the HTML5 standard, I still can't access HTML5 websites!

To me, this completely disqualifies HTML5 as being a standard.