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html5 posts

Filed under: Utilities, Video

HTML5 YouTube viewer: close, but not quite there

by Jay Hathaway Nov 8th 2009

Everyone knows Flash is a massive resource hog, especially on Mac or Linux. If you're sick of totally bogging down your system whenever you want to watch a YouTube video, the new video specifications in HTML5 might be the answer. By using HTML and plugging into the Mp4 streams on YouTube, the folks at NeoSmart have created an HTML5 YouTube Viewer. It doesn't quite work perfectly, and not every browser is ready for it, but it's nice proof-of-concept to try out.

The Download Squad team had mixed results watching videos with this viewer. Firefox was a bust - NeoSmart says it's because of proprietary codec issues - but some other browsers worked. I got working video (extremely smooth working video, actually) on both Chrome and Safari for Mac, but no audio. Meanwhile, on the Windows side, fellow Download Squad bloggers report that the HTML5 viewer works well in Chrome 4 in XP, and Chrome 3 on Windows 7.

Meanwhile,YouTube seems to be running its own HTML5 tests, including some examples of new in-browser 3D rendering features. Sounds like this could finally be the end of reliance on Flash ... once your browser supports it, or once YouTube starts supporting OGG Theora, Firefox and Chrome's video format of choice for HTML5.

Tags: codec, html5, neosmart, video, youtube

Filed under: Design, Utilities, Browsers

Modernizr: start implementing CSS 3 and HTML5 features now

by Jay Hathaway Jul 3rd 2009



So, you're a web designer, and you want to start taking advantage of new features in CSS 3 and HTML5. That's great, but you know that most of your users aren't running browsers that support these new standards. You could just wait for browsers to get with the times, or you could check out Modernizr.

Modernizr is a JavaScript library by Faruk Ates that detects which functionality a browser can support, and allows you to use if-statements to fine-tune your fallbacks for browsers that don't support the new hotness. Modernizr can't fix old browsers, but it can make it more practical to support newer ones. On top of all the CSS 3 styles it can detect support for, it also allows you to use and style HTML5 elements without breaking your site for IE users. Not too shabby for a little bit of JavaScript.

Tags: browsers, css-3, html5, javascript, modernizr, web-standards

Filed under: Business, Developer, Internet, Features, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Analysis

HTML 5 Wish List

by Ian Smith Nov 29th 2007

Wish list for HTML version 5Application are moving online at a frighteningly speed. People are increasingly using their computers as little more than internet terminals and media players. All of this innovation has happened, in part, because HTML and the browser marketplace has been relatively stable (even FireFox's original goal was to work like IE - only better). All that said, we've started to push Javascript, CSS, and HTML about as far as they can go.

Let's face it, HTML 4 is old. Really old. No doubt older than your PC. Older than your iPod (older than the very first iPod). It was built and designed solely for document rendering in the days before NetFlix added ratings to their website and Google started mapping. Now we have spreadsheets, word processors, work flow engines, games, and outlook style email clients running within the web browser. All on HTML 4. All with multiple hacks to make the code run correctly in as many browsers as possible. All with inherent security vulnerabilities . Isn't it time for a new version of HTML?

Douglas Crockford thinks so. The man behind JSON, JSLINT, and Manic Mansion (of all things) has a lot to say on the subject and offers so very timely and useful suggestions on what the next version should look like.

Here is the a quick summary of his wish list and an explanation of why Google (of all people) may make fixing HTML impossible.:

Read more →

Tags: browser wars, BrowserWars, firefox, html, html5, ie, opera, safari, wc3

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With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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