The Importance of the HTML Video Tag
Since Firefox, Safari, and recently Chrome hit the browser scene, the web has been growing and improving at a much faster pace. The next evolution of the web comes in the form of HTML 5, the latest HTML standard that brings native video playback, offline storage, 2D drawing via the canvas tag among others features. Of those, the video tag is the most important and critical to the continued success of the open web.
Native video playback inside a web browser will now be as simple as embedding an image into a page:
<video src="http://example.com/yourvideo.ogg" controls></video>
The benefits of this are immediately obvious to any software developer. It’s a native tag so it fits in much better to the web platform, it can be controlled through JavaScript, and no more messing around with a black-box flash embed. Side benefits of this are bringing video to all users, not just the platforms that Flash supports (stable 64 bit version + iPhone version).
So far only Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4 have built in support for the video tag; Opera and Chrome support is in the works.
The web has flourished and grown to where it is today because it is based on open standards and because it is not controlled by any one company or organization. Lets continue to keep the web open and successful by using the new video tag.
July 19th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
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