posted July 1, 2010 #
I hate to say I agree but I totally agree with
this article from the YouTube team regarding the wide adoption of the HTML5 <video> tag. Apart from the huge looming issue of a non-standard codec being used by the various browser outlets there's also the fact that HTML5 playback hasn't really shown itself to be as robust as what Flash can do. Imagine a standard YouTube embed and its ability to shrink the video playback down, show embed options, favorite, etc. All within the same widget-y area. I've not seen such a thing with HTML5. Or imagine a playlist of videos (you know - like
these) done with the HTML5 video tag - how would it handle multiple videos? Would it be an iframe and a ton of complicated Javascript thats not entirely support across browsers (thanks IE!)? I'm not saying it's not possible but it really does feel like Flash is the better solution in most of the cases.
Obviously I'm not trying to say anything disparaging about HTML5 - I think it is exciting and very promising move for the web - but I do see some legit concerns for some of the video handling in the future. A lot of the HTML5 markup seems like a step backwards instead of forwards but I'll be happy to eat my words on that.
