Computer Info

The underlying language used to build web pages is being substantially re-written for the first time in a decade.

The W3C, the web’s primary standards body, is revising HTML with an eye on improving the performance and capabilities of rich, browser-based applications. One of the great promises of HTML 5, the emerging standard, is that content creators will be able to embed video and audio files on web pages with the same simplicity and ease as images and links.

The tools being used to power this behavior are the Ogg Theora and Vorbis codecs maintained by the non-profit Xiph.org. Currently, most video and audio on the web is presented using either Adobe’s Flash Player, Microsoft’s Silverlight or Apple’s QuickTime. These are proprietary technologies, which means they come with various restrictions — licenses, patents and fees — attached.

Ogg, being open-source and patent-free, has no fees and very few use restrictions. Ogg has been around for a while. It was beaten out by MP3 in the Napster days as the audio format of choice, and has remained obscure ever since. It’s also gotten a bad reputation because of poor quality and large file sizes compared to competing tools like h.264, which is used by both Quicktime and Flash, and will be used in the next release of Silverlight.

However, in the past year, the quality issues dogging Ogg have been largely solved thanks to the increased interest and involvement of developers who want to see support for open video on the web become a reality.

At a recent developer conference, Google showed off how it was building Ogg support directly into its Chrome browser to handle video playback without using any plug-ins. Mozilla’s Jay Sullivan was then invited on stage, where he announced the next version of Firefox would also include built-in Ogg support, all part of a grand plan among browser makers to, in Sullivan’s words, free video from “plug-in prison.”

Webmonkey got a chance to sit down with Mozilla director of Firefox Mike Beltzner and Mozilla director of platform engineering Damon Sicore to talk about web video in Firefox 3.5, the next version of their company’s browser, which is due at the end of June.

We asked Mozilla how its full-force adoption of open video standards will free video from the so-called “plug-in prison,” and why it’s attempting to do so even though the browser used by some 60% of web surfers, Internet Explorer 8, doesn’t support any of the standards that make this scenario possible. [Clarification: As reader “redvine” points out in the comments, Theora plug-ins do exist for IE8 and IE7. There is no native support for Ogg or for the