HTML 5

Recently, the popular online video services Vimeo and YouTube announced that they would be rolling out support for HTML 5 video.

Wait. What’s HTML 5?

It’s the next version of  the basic code that is used to create web pages. It will offer various ways to create web pages that are richer, and both user and website coder friendly. It boasts a huge new features list that will help modernize the web. HTML 5 won’t be fully ready til 2022, but like most things in the web design business, some of (probably eventually most) benefits of HTML 5 will be able to be utilized before then. It all depends on what web browser creators (Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, Opera and the like) decide to support.

For more information on what HTML 5 has to offer, I recommend this site (particularly the video section).

What HTML 5 means for video.

HTML 5 will allow web designers to add video to sites without using Adobe Flash (which is what most video sites like YouTube currently use). Users will not have to download additional plugins for their browser to make the video work (like Quicktime, Flash Player, or Windows Media Player). Support for the video will just be built into the browsers.The problem right now is that no one can agree on what video file format to support (as detailed on the Dive into HTML 5 site).