Category: Plugins

video element support in browsers

Firefox has experimental support. Opera has experimental support. And now, Webkit has experimental support. The new HTML5 <video> element is getting support from a large part of the browser market.

According to the spec, User agents should support Ogg Theora video and Ogg Vorbis audio, as well as the Ogg container format; Firefox and Opera do so natively, while Webkit does so with a plugin for Quicktime (see Xiph.org).

According to my site stats – which are very far from being representative – roughly 60% of my visitors use one of the three browsers mentioned above; that’s a pretty big potential market. And remember, what the geeks use now, everybody will use in a year or two.


Microformats: page to phone in a minute

It doesn’t matter how much I try to explain the value of microformats, a good visual demonstration can show their benefits better than I ever could. Here’s a short video showing how the Operator extension can get information from a Google search to your mobile phone in less than a minute.

That makes a strong case for microformats. At least, I’m sold. Now how do we convince the other 99% of the world who have no idea what they are?


Seeing the light on microformats

It took me a while to see the benefits of microformats, but now I’m definitely there. In October 2006, the UK WSG meeting was all about microformats, and I decided it was too faddy, too niche for me, and that I wouldn’t bother. I regret that now.

The first thing that changed my mind for me was seeing Dan Cederholm’s presentation, Interface Design Juggling. He clearly explained their benefits, and made me think about ways my own sites could be enhanced by them.

The second thing was the suite of tools supplied by Technorati; the hCard and hCalendar convertors are easy ways to display how useful a little bit of standardised mark-up can be.

The third thing – and the real deal-clincher – was the Operator add-on for Firefox. This displays a small icon in the browser which alerts you to the presence of microformats on the page, then allows you to use the data for an amazing array of purposes; adding events to your calendar or contact details to your address book, searching for addresses in online maps, searching the leading social websites for related content… it really shows the potential of the semantic web.

For anyone still not convinced of the benefits of microformats, I urge you to install Operator and right-click on the following paragraph; once you see what you can do with it, you’re unlikely to remain unconvinced.

This post was written by Peter Gasston, who lives in Camberwell, South-East London in the United Kingdom. You can email him at if you want to say hello.


Exploring The Web Developer Toolbar

If you use Firefox and Chris Pedrick’s invaluable Web Developer extension, this should be very useful to you: 10 Things You May Not Know About the Web Developer Toolbar. I hadn’t seen the ‘View Color Information’ option before; it’s amazing!


IE Alternatives to Firebug

Update: This is an old post and the information is a little out of date. Internet Explorer now comes with a very decent set of developer tools.

Firefox is very likely the browser of choice for many web developers, and with one very good reason: Firebug, which is, IMHO, hands-down the most important web development tool around. Seriously, if you haven’t tried Firebug, you’re probably wasting a lot of development time.

It’s so good, Yahoo! have created a full-time position just to develop it. I saw a little preview during Nate Koechley’s talk at @media 2007; they’ve built a plug-in architecture, of which the first is probably going to be a page load analyser. It’s an IDE in itself – and it’s a free plugin!

Now, my personal opinion of Internet Explorer aside, I do appreciate the effort their team is making to engage the development community. In a new blog post they’ve listed a series of development tools and plugins for developers, so if you’re in the unfortunate position of having to develop in IE (or, perhaps, you are just a bit weird and choose to do so), you can experience a small sample of the Firebug goodness. Doesn’t beat the real thing, though.


Mozilla gets native video support

Mozilla’s Chris Double has announced on his blog that he’s implemented the (proposed) HTML5 <video> element in a build of Firefox (demo screencast). The element will natively support OGG Theora files.

While I think this is great news and has a lot of potential, I foresee one major obstacle to this becoming standard: proprietary codecs. If they decide to implement it, Apple will want Quicktime in Safari, and Microsoft will want Windows Media Video in Internet Explorer.

As one commenter notes, the idea will be to have fallback options for anyone who doesn’t have an OGG player, probably in Java; there are some examples of how this will work on the Wikipedia Video page (caution: this caused Firefox on OS X to crash, although Firefox on Ubuntu played it perfectly).

Theora is obviously the most common-sense cross-browser, cross-platform, non-proprietary solution; but since when has the internet been governed by common sense?

Update: Since writing this post, I’ve found out that Opera also has an experimental implementation.


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Aside

I’ve updated my Speaking page to include more conferences, more videos, and a little on my speaking requirements and preferences. I’m planning to cut down on the number of talks I give in 2014 (twelve is too many), but am always open to interesting offers and opportunities, so please get in touch if you’re organising an event.

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