For a long time people have been embedding flash movies in their posts using both <object> and <embed> tags. However the planet software, rightfully so, strips those tags out as unsafe.

Native video support, however, is designed such that it’s safe to include video in html and more recent versions of feedparser support passing video elements through to the planet software.  Here’s what one of my recent posts looks like on Mozilla’s planet site:

One problem is that the controls don’t show up.  If you’re using <video> and you want the controls to show up you have to add a controls attribute to the video element, like so:

<video src="foo.ogv" controls="true"></video>

feedparser was stripping out the controls attribute. (In Firefox if you right click on the video you can still play it manually.)

However, Sam Ruby was nice enough to fix that problem in feedparser.  Admins for the various planets should probably update their feedparser versions to pick up this fix to get ready for the new video-enabled world.

Thanks, Sam!

But I also thought I would post about it as a good framework for other open source projects to build from.  There’s a lot of hard-won experience wrapped up in these docs – please use them for your project!

• What is it about? It’s an event for people passionate about the open web. Each event includes discussion, hands-on-demos and collaborative scheming about ways to promote and protect the open participatory nature of the internet. It’s not just about Mozilla. It’s about making the web more open. More details on the agenda.
• Who should attend and participate? Local Mozillians, bloggers, designers, hackers, creative commonors and other open web aficionados
• Where? SURFnet
• When? Friday 6 March, 2009 from 10:00 to 17:00
• Want to know more? Please visit the MozCamp Utrecht Wiki page
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So if you’re interested in coming out for it then sign up!