Java Reference
In-Depth Information
15
HTML5 Media
What You Will learn in this Chapter:
➤
Playing audio and video natively in modern web browsers
➤
Writing a custom control UI for media playback
➤
Synchronizing your UI with the browser's native controls
➤
Parsing JSON back into actual objects and values you can use in
your pages
Wrox.Com Code doWnloads for this Chapter
You can find the wrox.com code downloads for this chapter at
http://www.wiley.com/go/
BeginningJavaScript5E
on the Download Code tab. You can also view all of the examples
At its inception, the Internet was a text delivery system. Whereas the first HTML specification
described the
<img>
tag for embedding images within a document, HTTP and HTML were
designed primarily for transmitting and displaying text (hence, Hyper‐
Text
).
In the late 1990s, personal computers were finding their way into more households, and ordinary
people were able to access the web. Naturally, people wanted more from the web, and browser
makers accommodated this by designing their browsers to use plug‐ins, third‐party applications
that were designed to do things browsers normally didn't, such as playing video and audio.
Plug‐ins solved a particular problem, but they weren't without their faults—the largest being
the need for so many of them. A wide variety of music and video formats were available,
and certain plug‐ins would only play certain formats. Stability was also an issue because a
malfunctioning plug‐in could crash the browser.
Then in 2005, some enterprising folks created YouTube, a video‐sharing website. Instead of
relying on QuickTime or Windows Media Player, YouTube's videos were served to users as
