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Til then, we have to gather as webmasters and block users of versions of IE that don't comply with web standards, otherwise ten years from now, we'll still use the same old technologies and hacks
Excellent! (At last)
That's all very good and well, but it's twice the serve space and extra development work for what should have been standardised.
As much as I hate flash, I can't blame web developers for using FLV to get around the lack of video embedding standard.
Webkit is open source, isn't it?
Won't some interested Webkit user (possibly Google Chrome) want to make sure that webkit can compete with this? ...
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/02/mozilla-demos-impre...
The HTML 5 video element will also arrive in Firefox 3.1. This will allow video content to be embedded directly in Web pages, controlled with JavaScript, and manipulated through the DOM. It's a major step forward for rich media content on the Web. Firefox 3.1 will ship with built-in support for the Ogg Vorbis and Theora formats—open audio and video codecs that are believed to be unencumbered by patents. The actual codec implementations are integrated directly into the browser itself, so content in those formats will be playable without requiring any external components or plugins.
Blizzard says that Mozilla aims to encourage an explosion of creativity around video that will mirror the kind of uninhibited innovation that has flourished in the Web's inclusive standards-base ecosystem. Mozilla is actively contributing funding to Ogg development efforts to help accelerate the process. He says that Theora, which is used by Wikipedia, has the potential to achieve quality comparable to MPEG4. High definition video, however, will require the Dirac format, which could eventually be included in future versions of Firefox when it matures."
If Firefox can do all this, and then soon after (or even perhaps in the same timeframe) so too can Opera and Google Chrome, then Safari is going to have to implement it also in order to stay relevant.
We are right now not far away from the tipping point when Firefox + Google Chrome + Safari + Opera represents more than 50% of all web browsers. When we do get to that point, and they can all play rich content (in Vorbis, Theora and Dirac) straight out of box ... then we may hopefully finally see the back of browser-based lock-in to web content start to be broken.
FTA:
The most impressive demo that he showed during his presentation used JavaScript in worker threads to programmatically detect motion in a playing video. This one has to be seen to be believed
Wow.
Edited 2009-02-25 05:04 UTC
Just FYI...
Safari 4 supports the new Javascript Worker object that your quote from Ars talks about.
Safari 4 also handles the audio and video tags you talk about, supporting all audio and video file types that QuickTime does. In fact, Safari 3 did too. I've got the Ogg QuickTime plugin installed on my Mac and have been happily playing ogg vorbis files through HTML 5 audio tags for many months.
Unfortunately I can't say the same for Firefox 3.1. I regularly check the Firefox "Minefield" nightly builds, and have never had the audio playback work on my Mac. The same build releases on Linux do play back audio. Windows releases have had poor performance for audio playback.
On these fronts Safari does not really have any catching up to do with Firefox.
It is a shame that Apple are being arses by not supporting the Ogg codecs out of the box though.







Member since:
2005-12-05
without mandatory Ogg?
It seems that (thanks to Nokia) we'll see the the same old "each browser does it its own way". Firefox will go with Ogg, IE will pretty surely go with WMV/WMA, and Apple, it seems, will go with MPEG4.
The obvious outcome is that Flash/FLV will continue being used because it's the common denominator. And that sucks...