The Future of Video on Web Pages
By now everyone is tired of going to some website and NOT being able to play the video there because of a missing plugin, incompatibility, browser issues, etc.
The next major release of HTML (version 5, the language that gives structures to a webpage) will be released (eventually). As you would expect there will be a number of improvements to many areas. One part in particular has cause some debate as of late and that has to with a new tag, the <video> tag.
This new tag would allow for defining video, such as a movie clip or other video streams, without having to use any plugins or extra JavaScript files to make it play, so kind of like the <img> tag. Since this is supposed to become a standard, some of the debates around it have to do with what kind of codecs should be used and other format related tech things.
One thing is for sure, if there is an agreement to use one single defined set of standards, then everyone will benefit from this new user-enhancing feature.
