HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
In 2007, Anne van Kesteren wrote to the Working Group:
“Opera has some internal experimental builds with an imple-
mentation of a
<video>
element. The element exposes a simple
API (for the moment) much like the
Audio()
object:
play()
,
pause()
,
stop()
. The idea is that it works like
<object>
except
that it has special
<video>
semantics much like
<img>
has
image semantics.”
While the API has increased in complexity, van Kesteren's origi-
nal announcement is now implemented in all the major brows-
ers, including Internet Explorer 9.
An obvious companion to a
<video>
element is an
<audio>
element; they share many similar features, so in this chapter
we discuss them together and note only the differences.
<video>: Why do you need
a <video> element?
Previously, if developers wanted to include video in a web
page, they had to make use of the
<object>
element, which is
a generic container for “foreign objects.” Due to browser incon-
sistencies, they would also need to use the previously invalid
<embed>
element and duplicate many parameters. This resulted
in code that looked much like this:
<object width=”425” height=”344”>
<param name=”movie” value=”http://www.youtube.com/
¬ v/9sEI1AUFJKw&hl=en_GB&fs=1&”></param>
<param name=”allowFullScreen”
value=”true”></param>
<param name=”allowscriptaccess”
value=”always”></param>
<embed src=”http://www.youtube.com/
¬ v/9sEI1AUFJKw&hl=en_GB&fs=1&”
type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”
allowscriptaccess=”always”
allowfullscreen=”true” width=”425”
height=”344”></embed>
</object>
