But Chris Double beat me to the punch and has an excellent little tutorial about how he’s using the video tag with elegant fallbacks. (In his post you can use something other than the Java-based fallback. In my case I linked back to vimeo.)

Enjoy!

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
• Interested? Please register.

So if you’re interested in coming out for it then sign up!

The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostered ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property.  — Unknown

Another great example of how technology often changes how we exchange information.  Fun talk, worth watching.

David Carson was also interviewed in Helvetica. It’s a movie worth watching if you haven’t seen it yet.

Update on February 24th, 2009: Due to popular demand I’ve made a screencast of the two demos that I used in this presentation.

I’ve put up slides from my talk at SCALE 2009.  Lots of people were interested in the slides.  There’s the .pdf I’ve linked to above and the original .odp format.  It covers most of the interesting new technical features that we’re going to include in Firefox 3.1.

Here are two relevant links from the talk:

• Firefox 3.1 for Developers
  
• The web-tech blog for technical updates to Mozilla and Firefox

Enjoy!

It sounds like some people in Norway have started to band together and just choose not to support it.  But one thing that would really help is to just pick a date and have it spread world wide.

My suggestion is for everyone to just say that Dec 31st, 2009 is the last day it should be supported – drop support from libraries, stop testing, etc.  IE6 usage is already sliding quickly and it’s time to help it across the line.  The web needs an upgrade.

Update: There’s a great set from Norway on flickr that Paul Kim pointed out.

1. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Outstanding TEDtalk on John’s weblog.  Elizabeth Gilbert talks about the creative process, suffering and her thoughts on a better way of dealing with both the successes and failures in writing.  It’s funny, honest and you can tell that this is something she’s lived through.

2. Joss Whedon’s Top 10 Writing Tips.  Buffy, Firefly, all that joy.  It’s a quick list and I find myself going back to it for ideas on how to make changes or make something more interesting and approachable.  Worth bookmarking for sure.

3. Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction.  Ever try and write something while you’re connected to the Internet?  Yeah, it’s basically impossible.  He doesn’t suggest that you give up connectivity but offers up a bunch of different ways to mitigate the pain and turn it into an advantage.  (Not that I use this – I do my best thinking + writing when I’m trapped on an airplane.  But still.)

4. Eric Idle, on John Cleese’s Writing Process.  A quick two minutes on writing with John Cleese.  Funny, and somewhat useful. Specificity vs. big picture.  A fun video that puts great pictures in your head of what it might be like to work with John Cleese.  Mostly here just to spice things up a bit.

5. A Transom Interview with Ira Glass.  (Also, part 2 and part 3.)  If you made it this far into this post you’re probably willing to invest some time into reading through this interview.  Ira Glass is one of the main forces behind This American Life which includes some of the best story telling I’ve heard in my young life.  And it’s the best of this small lot of resources.  Ira talks about learning how to create radio shows, finding the heart of stories, learning from other people and also what not to do.  These are long and include some great audio samples and is worth your time to go through it.  Lots of good thought and inspiration here.

Enjoy!