Sad news for HTML5, while Ogg Vorgis/Theora were not necessary to make HTML5 work, a standard codec is needed to make some part of HTML5 usefull - the part I worked on for WebKit/Gtk+. This point has been repeated over and over: all browsers implemented HTML5 needs to have a common codec.
While there is no default image format in the HTML* spec, we were lucky nobody ever used their patents against JPEG. In fact, it is most probably because of said patents that Apple and Nokia were reluctant to include Vorbis/Theora on their OS or their phones.
Someone has to fix that patent system!
I’ve been working on bringing support for media tags in WebKit/Gtk+ in the past weeks. Based on Antti Koivisto’s work on the general WebKit support for the tags and his QuickTime implementation, I was able to provide the basics for this to work.
Sure there are sharp corners right now, it’s a good start. While I did the backend part, connecting WebKit and GStreamer, Alp Toker did a GStreamer sink for Cairo that completes the work. You can see the screenshot on his blog.
Media tags will enable web developer to integrate video in a page as easily as it is for an image nowadays. You could eventually implement a complete media player within a HTML file. With all the major browsers publicly announcing their progress on the matter (Safari, WebKit/Gtk, Firefox, Opera), we can sure hope we’ll see less flash and more pure video in the next years.
