Getting a video element on the page (for firefox3.5 anyway) was not an issue. The video tag was easy to understand. It was even fairly simple to begin the construction of my own interface – instead of using the default ‘controls’. But what I am confused about is why?

All this clamor around open video and the new html spec have claimed to remove the ‘walled garden’ that flash is within the context of a page. Meaning that while users can see and interact with the content on the page, machines and code can not.

Now with the new html 5 video tag, spiders and other software can now identify the fact that there is a video on the page.

Can someone please help me understand how that is so much different than flash?

Whether or not the machine or software can identify video embedded on a page is still moot point until we can train that ‘reader’ to parse and understand the contents AND context of the video.

in setting up a new dev environment i finally found a way to set up symlinks so I work without having to manually change my test pages. to set up the symlink i used this valuable information:

To set up a symbolic link type

    ln -s linktarget linkname

where linktarget is the directory to link to and linkname is the name of the symbolic link. You can type:

    rm linkname

to remove the link. Type

man ln

for more information.

in order to allow apache access on my mac i had to add an extra entry to the httpd.conf file (on the mac @ /private/etc/httpd/httpd.conf – remember to back it up) that looks something like this:

<Directory /where/you/export/your/swf>
    AllowOverride all
    Options FollowSymLinks Indexes
    Order allow,deny
    Allow from all
</Directory>

now in all of my test pages i can reference

<embed src=linkname></embed>

and whatever swf is in the location that i told the symlink to go to will be pulled in.

Thanks Justin!