Sharovatov’s Weblog

HTML5 video tag and Internet Explorer

Posted in browsers, web-development by sharovatov on 5 June 2009

It’s interesting to see how popular <video> and <audio> tags are getting now. Every browser tries to implement it as soon as it can and shout about it as loud as possible. And now people are even starting blaming IE for being old and not supporting inline video and audio.

The whole situation reminds me of AJAX where original concept was invented by Microsoft (actual ActiveX was shipped with IE5 in 1999), then it was standardised by W3C (in a different way), then implemented by other browsers, and then people started accusing IE for not supporting this new W3C standard.

The same thing is now happening with inline video/audio playback concept, which has been introduced in IE2 in 1995, almost 15 years ago. Yes, 15 years ago, when W3C has been just founded and was still asking MIT/CSAIL to join. And now this functionality is being spec’ed in HTML5 as <video> and <audio> tags. Opera, Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome start supporting <video> and <audio> and are making a loud marketing message of it.

The original concept that was introduced in IE2 (and supported in following versions) was adding a DYNSRC attribute to IMG element:

<img src="cover.gif" dynsrc="clock.avi" controls>

When IE saw dynsrc attribute, it tried loading the movie and playing it. “Controls” attribute made IE show simple playback controls.

This is how it looked like in IE3:

ie3

However, in future versions the support for DYNSRC was limited to make developers to switch to other ways (<object>/<embed>/SMIL video). In IE5 no controls were shown, in IE7 DYNSRC ceased at all.

World changes, and now the functionality that nobody’s been using for a decade seems really new and interesting. It’s great that WHATWG is spending time on defining clear standard on how this should work and it’s really cool that Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari already support this draft. Of course, Silverlight supports greater level of RIA, but giving that IE Team is now really focused on following public standards, I hope that in IE9 we’ll have native support for <video>/<audio> as we had native support for XMLHttpRequest in IE7.

But my point is – credit for inline video playback functionality invention should be definitely given to IE2.


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  1. progg.ru said, on 8 June 2009 at 4:37 am

    HTML5 video tag and Internet Explorer « Sharovatov’s Weblog…

    Thank you for submitting this cool story – Trackback from progg.ru…

  2. Walter McGinnis said, on 10 June 2009 at 5:53 am

    It’s not the actual innovation of being able to include audio and video in HTML that is important. Browser vendor specific hacks have been around for a long time as you illustrate. It’s that it is being done in a cross browser standard way, i.e. something everyone agrees upon and is vender neutral (though at this point is only a draft standard).

    This allows content providers to use audio and video without having to tie the implementation to only one particular browser. That is a big deal for content providers. The fact that HTML 5’s audio/video are being adopted in practice by major browsers gives indication that these will become an actual standard and the era of browser or plugin specific hacks to present audio and video will come to an end.

    Here’s a good ArsTechnica article on it:

    http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/05/google-dailymotion-endorse-html-5-and-standards-based-video.ars

  3. sharovatov said, on 10 June 2009 at 8:51 am

    @Walter McGinnis

    I completely agree that this is important to have a standardised way to embed inline video (and to control it from javascript). As I’ve said, it’s great that HTML5 gives us such a way and I really hope it gets supported in IE9.

    The main thing I wanted to say was that we have to give credit to IE team for introducing this concept and providing the first implementation.

  4. jaw said, on 9 August 2009 at 9:58 pm

    Good web developers never used the tags you mention because they were vendor-specific (in the beginning there was netscape and IE, remember?), and the object tags required codecs to be installed on the client computer, even worse. Using those equals bad web site design. Who invented it first doesn’t matter, Microsoft never makes anything that is compatible with anything else even now that they had a very good chance. Instead they’re bashing everyone by trying to force them into silverlight. Flash is per definition even as bad as it’s closed/proprietary so the video tags (relying on a format as open as HTML).


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