Simantic

The Future of Video on the Web

With all the talk in the technology world as to how the new iPhone’s antenna is performing (not to mention the World Cup, a new Prime Minister, blah, blah), some may have missed this…

YouTube software developers posted on their YouTube API Blog on Tuesday a detailed, balanced an informative article about the pros and cons of using HTML5 vs Flash for video playback. The article backed the use of Flash saying that — in reference to the HTML5 video tag — “We need to do more than just point the browser at a video file like the image tag does – there’s a lot more to it than just retrieving and displaying a video.”

In addition to pointing out technologies that Flash video has over HTML5 video such as streaming, embedding, protection and camera access, they also claimed that the web should have an open video format, namely Google’s recently acquired video codec VP8 and WebM technologies.

This adds to arguably realistic, yet enraged sentiments expressed by popular video player software company LongTail Video as well as Adobe et al. It also brings us back to reality from the distorted hyperbole that is Steve Jobs’ perspective. Keep in mind that Google, the owner of YouTube, has a vested interest in both HTML5 (having one of their employees as the ‘creator’ of the specification) and Flash (being a close partner with Adobe in projects such as the Open Screen Project and Flash playback on the Android platform).

Add comment 2nd July 2010 Simon

Linked Data

An interesting talk from TED.com about the future of the web, by the father of the web, Tim Berners-Lee.

Add comment 25th May 2009 Simon

Because ICANN

Soon, top level domains on the internet may be anything. What?..

ICANN Announcement
BBC News
List of articles on Google News

1 comment 27th June 2008 Simon

Firefox 3

Yep, the full version of Firefox 3 is out now. I downloaded it today and so far have noticed that there are quite a few differences in the interface, mostly for the better. The best thing seems to be performance, notably that the app is much smoother both on Mac and Windows — not the memory hog of old. The only downside my workmates and I noticed seems to be the rendering of various elements. Certain images and html elements are sometimes slightly stretched by a pixel or so, probably due to the browser’s rounding of pixels. See this post from jQuery’s John Resig to see what i mean.

Due to Firefox 3’s support for web standards, its ability to be used across multiple systems, its consistency compared to its previous versions and it’s support for a multitude of plugins, it rules supreme, in my opinion, as the most diverse and effective browser for web design and development. For everyday use, I believe that it’s the best browser on all platforms but Mac, where– let’s just say it ties with Safari.

Add comment 18th June 2008 Simon