Video For Everybody! (at last…?)

I have a strange inkling that Kroc Camen’s project ‘Video For Everybody!’ will become important. I’m not sure how, or who’s going to instigate this elevation to importance, but I think it’ll happen. The project addresses a requirement that has sorely needed work for some time, and in an elegant fashion that’s just begging for core inclusion in all manner of content management systems as well as hand-crafted websites. It also bridges the gap between HTML5 (the future – when it happens) and HTML4.01/XHTML1.1 (ie, what’s in common use right now) whilst simultaneously addressing the increasing demands of clients/bosses who must have video without knowing what that might involve, or how it’ll be handled by all kinds of browsers and mobile devices.

Briefly, the project’s output is a code snippet that will display video on site. Sounds simple? Try doing that and you’ll very quickly come up against all kinds of problems, issues and hurdles. This snippet handles all of those, pretty much – by bubbling down through a set of possibilities for playing video files based on your browser:

• HTML5 ‘video’ elements, or if that’s not supported…
• Quicktime, or if that’s not supported…
• Flash, or if that’s not supported…
• A static image and links to download video files.

It manages all of this without JavaScript and in a relatively compact manner. This means that as long as you’ve got video available in a few different file formats (which shouldn’t be difficult), you can be confident that it’ll play out on your website whether it’s viewed in a fancy modern HTML5-supporting browser, on an iPhone, or even (my word) on IE6. I think that’s pretty cool.

The magic of WordPress

My first inspiration? WordPress. It’s easy to forget that here is a system that lets you get a blog up and running within minutes, with an outstandingly usable, beautifully-designed management interface, completely themeable, with no end of plugins to very quickly develop something that’s unique and personalised. With a bit of work a WordPress blog can be extended into a feature-rich website without the need for a whole lot of development nous. Regardless of your views on the value of everybody and their dog having a blog or website these days, it’s tools like this that are at the heart of the democratic value of the internet. It used to be a challenge to get something online – now the challenge lies in making content worth reading. What’s more, it’s free.

Yep, there are other systems that do very similar things, I realise that. And I’m not blindly trumpeting WordPress as the answer to everything. But it, and its ilk, will come to be recognised as one of the most important developmental steps when the history of the internet comes to be written.