Man. I’ve been working hard over the past 48 hours on my 10K Apart submission - something audio-related - and it’s really driven home just how fragmented the implementation of the new HTML5 <audio> and <video> tags are across browsers.

I’m sure most web nerds are familiar with the rift between Safari and Firefox over which video format to support, H.264 or Ogg Theora1, but there isn’t even an audio format that’s supported by all the major players: not MP3, not Ogg Vorbis, not even WAV. All of which makes it virtually impossible to use either of these two great new tags, at least not without encoding your media in multiple different formats and thus introducing some very costly overhead to any media-related web app. This is progress? Quite frankly, Flash is still the best solution, at least for the time being.

Anyway, here’s hoping for at least WAV support across all platforms within the next few months. We can all agree on that, right?

1 To be fair, this is a pretty important argument: should patent-encumbered formats like H.264 or MP3 really be the standard of the web? (Or alternately, as the other camp would argue: is Ogg Theora really patent-free?)

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  1. rofreg posted this