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HTML5 Video. It just sounds sexy. Even typing it stirs an excitement inside me usually reserved for theme park rides and new episodes of Family Guy. It’s one of the most lauded features within the new HTML spec, and also one of the most divisive.

Perhaps not divisive in the web community, most designers and developers seem to love the idea of it, but certainly divisive in the real world of cross browser support, licensing and (dare we even mention it) Adobe Flash.

HTML5 Video in Safari with native browser controls

Let’s start at the end. Internet Explorer 9 promises to support WebM video, one of the three main contenders to the HTML5 video throne, but from IE8 backwards you’re out of luck. In short, you need to use Flash. The same is true of all but the most recent versions of other major browsers, which of course poses a very relevant question.

Why Use HTML5 Video at All?

It’s a great question and, as I’ve mentioned, a divisive one. There are myriad reasons why and we’ll go on and look at a few of them. But if your users follow the usual browsing trend the chances are they won’t be able to see the video and you’ll need a fallback to Flash.

Even when IE9 makes it’s debut to the masses there will still be a legion of IE8, IE7 and IE6 users, together with other older browsers, that will need you to keep dipping your toe in Adobe’s pool. (more…)

Perhaps one of the biggest holes in WordPress prior to version 3 was the lack of custom menu support. Menus often had to be hand coded into header.php and, whilst they could be ‘smart’, it often let the client needing a PHP savvy developer to make alterations to the setup.

That was then. Now, at (long) last, we are able to give some of this control back to the client. Or, if you’re using WordPress for your own site, you’re able to take control of your menu system with a wonderful new drag-and-drop GUI rather than diving into the code. (more…)

Let me get something off my chest. WordPress sometimes, just ever-so occasionally, makes things sound a little harder than they actually are. Custom post types sound quite scary, but really they aren’t. Jane Wells, WordPress UI guru, commented on their name in my last article for Think Vitamin:

“They just got named poorly because they live in the Posts table in the database. Think of them more like custom objects/content types.”

Cool – it’s just custom content. What’s the point of that then? Can’t we just categorise blog posts and order our pages in nice hierarchies? Can’t we use conditionals to spit out different CSS stylesheets? Well yes, we could. But admit it – it’s not fun.

And hands up if you’ve ever tried to explain to a client what a custom field is. Hurts, doesn’t it? So thank goodness for wonderful people like Jane who have given us a solution. (more…)