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December 7, 2007

Easier VIDEO?

Easier VIDEO? I don't think that the launch of a VIDEO tag will lead to this result: "New features in the Firefox and Opera browsers could make it less complex and cheaper for people to incorporate video into their Web sites, representatives of Mozilla and Opera say." On the tag basis alone, Netscape introduced EMBED, then Microsoft countered with OBJECT, and a W3C committee later voted on OBJECT-but-no-EMBED, and a few years after that Microsoft moved OBJECT to external JavaScript... a VIDEO tag will have a difficult adolescence, as the world figures out how to do markup all over again. Beyond mere tagging, you've got compression and archival workflows to deal with, as well as reconciliation of different codec implementations in different browsers, and the design/development possibilities would be less than current reality as well. The Mozilla and Opera businesses can do as they see fit; I'm reacting mostly to the "it'll be simpler" stance in the media campaign. I think the exact opposite is far more likely.

Posted by JohnDowdell at December 7, 2007 11:56 AM