If you recently downloaded a Safari update, you might not have know that the latest version is the worlds first implementation of the new HTML5 draft standard. So what does all that mean? Well without going into all the details of the new standard, the new standard implements the <video> and <audio> tags to add native support for embedding video and audio into web pages.
So what does this have to do with the iPhone? Since the inception of mobile phone browsers, one of the biggest drawbacks has been the lack of support for flash on the phone’s browser. Why do you need flash? Well almost every website has an embedded flash object; so on a mobile phone it doesn’t work! For example, YouTube and many other similar sites rely on your browser to have the Flash player installed to view the videos.
Now that web browsers will start having native support to embed multimedia, we will start to see more sites ditching the embedded flash and use the native video support. Obviously flash is used for navigation on some sites, but where you most often see it used, it would be a better design to use a native video tag.
Since the iPhone uses Safari, it won’t be long before it also support the native video/audio tags. I’m betting that Apple is going to push this and suggest that everyone start building their websites with these tags so they can deliver multimedia content to mobile browsers. Foolish you think? Well Jobs also told everyone to build Web Apps and look at how many people did that (Facebook, Bank Of America, MT, etc.)
So if you want to see a demo of the new native support, check out this video  on Webkit’s page.
Do you think think that native multimedia support in the browser will change the way websites are built?Â
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