Firefox to support Theora video

Firefox to support Theora video

Posted Aug 9, 2008 18:11 UTC (Sat) by gerv (guest, #3376)
In reply to: Firefox to support Theora video by jwb
Parent article: Firefox to support Theora video

The standard <object> tag from HTML4 solves this problem much more elegantly.

But browser makers who actually have to implement it hate it, and prefer more specific tags (see discussion on the WHAT-WG mailing list, and the rationale for creating <video> and <audio>).

It seems that the WHAT-WG goes for pragmatism, what works and what can be coded and deployed easily over theoretical purity. That's one of the things that distinguishes it from the W3C (although the joint working of the two organisations may indicate a change there). This approach has the advantage of things actually getting implemented.

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I just did some tests with MSIE and it seems that <object> inside <video> does what you'd want
on that browser, so my objection is wrong.  I tested this before but I must have screwed it
up.  I now don't think you'd need any kind of javascript to sniff the <video> tag since MSIE
just ignores it and parses down to <object>.