I have no criticisms for sink.js my comment was more on the philosophical side. The danger in a solution like sink.js is it becomes "good enough" until people need more than it can provide. Then they turn to the APIs and end up dealing with fragmentation.

If you think about it that's exactly what happened with IE circa Version 5. The one good thing IE did was make it possible to develop for one browser. What the industry should have done then was what they're doing with HTML5 now. Define a standard so other competitors could enter the market without creating fragmentation. But that's not what happened and now everyone has to write for 3 browsers (if not more thanks to IE7,8,and 9)

Same with sink.js. For all the bad in Flash almost everyone has it and it's a consistent thing you can write to. If people use sink.js now and don't pay attention to the fragmented APIs underneath we'll end up having to write to 3 different APIs down the line.

So again I'm not against sink.js. I'm just saying people using it need to realize exactly what you said and pressure browsers for a common API in the long run.

You're right about IE5 (then 6) stagnating, but the predicate there was Microsoft's OS monopoly and browser tying. No such condition today -- we have a much more competitive browser market, and no browser can afford to self-stagnate.

Roc says he is nearly done with MediaStreams and if that looks good to enough people on the standards bodies, or really among the browser implementors, then it'll go forward.