HTML 5 to the Rescue
June 27th, 2009
For web designers, dealing with images is simple. You just use the <img> HTML tag, and the browser knows how to handle it, whether the image type is PNG, JPEG, GIF, TIFF, or whatever. The same cannot be said for video content. Adobe Flash has become an informal standard, but even then you have to use the nonstandard <embed> tag with lots of vendor-specific information, or the horrible <object> tag that’s official but even more cumbersome. HTML version 5 hopes to do away with all this by making video content as easy to handle as images are today. The browsers will have built-in codecs to display the video, and all the designer will have to do is use the <video> tag. No more browser plug-ins for Flash, Silverlight, or JavaFX.
This is only one of HTML 5’s new features. For instance, there’s an <audio> tag for (you guessed it…) audio content.
HTML 5 is still in draft form and won’t see widespread use for years, but some newer browsers already support certain features. And it will make life much easier for web developers.
Link: http://www.infoworld.com/…
(via Slashdot)
