No Plug in Required

There is a new video player out for the web. HTML 5 is now available on Vimeo and YouTube. It allows you to view a video with out any plug in being installed on your computer. It is currently still in beta testing and is only compatible with a couple browsers at this point. Those browsers are Chrome, ChromeFrame on Internet Explorer and Safari at this point.

It appears that not every one on the net is happy about this development. Vimeo spokesperson Brad Daugherty said "Almost every thread on the Internet about HTML 5 devolves into some kind of flamewar. Please don't comment here extolling the virtues of open source or unencumbered codecs,". Deborah Szajngarten, director of Marketing and Communications at Vimeo points out this is only a test at this time and their goal was to provide the video community with the best tools out there.

So what are the other reasons that are railing against this change. I mean how could a User-Friendly plug in free player be a bad thing. If you are Adobe or Microsoft, you would be thinking other wise. Videos are big business. Both companies want to keep their footholds in this business via their propriety platform.


The article writer thinks that by the end of the year there will be more devices like the IPhone that doesn't support flash will be introduced to the game and the war will be on.

HTML 5

HTML 5 is going to be the markup language of the future, at least that's what some people hope. This new language was created by a group called WHATWG, a small group founded by people from Apple, Mozilla Foundation and Opera Software. The idea was to make designing web pages easier by creating element tags more specific to each area of a page. For instance instead of having loads of div tags in your code you can have a header tag, footer tag, and section tags. The problem with all of these new tags is that there are a ton of them. You can actually download a cheat sheet, which is 4 pages long! Here is a preview below:


All in all HTML 5 does seem to offer plenty of pluses. Not only is the doc type simple (), but it also has new API capabilities. The audio and video capabilities seem to be the most intriguing. By using these, flash players could become obsolete. These are just a few of the many updates that are planned for HTML 5. You can read more about it at SmashingMagazine.

This version is not yet widely used, in fact there are sources that say it will not be fully implemented until 2022. However, you can use this version now you just won't have the full functionality on certain browsers. It is probably a good thing that this will not be completely implemented for quite some years because even though it may be a better way to use markup language, it seems like it will take some getting used to by everyone.