Sadly, no. While MP4 has effectively won the battle to be the de facto standard video format, support for it still isn't completely universal and probably never will be until the patent issues are irrelevant. And of course there are numerous different variations that all typically end in .mp4 so you're also stuck with either inefficient encoding for widest possible support or smaller files but limited range.

As for controls, I have lost track of how many times even the same browser has changed its controls within the past 2 years. There is basically no standardisation across browsers at all. It doesn't matter much if you're building YouTube or Vimeo, when it's obvious which parts of the page are videos. However, if you want to integrate video content into a more general page the same way you'd use an image, having no idea whether your visitors will even get any indication that it actually is a video, or where that indication will be if so, makes it absurdly difficult to present the content well across browsers without going 100% custom controls and ignoring the built-in browser ones entirely (which then runs into numerous JS bugs, causing problems of their own).

Walmart and McDonalds are most certainly hated for the products they provide. They're just big enough that they don't need to care. They can be viewed as crap by a large chunk of the population and still make money on what's left.

There are plenty of mindless bargain hunters and people with no taste.

right now, the only thing they don't do is 'sell ink'.

I think she's the right person to help with that.

not much else, though. but if ink at a high price is your game, she's the lady to go see.

there is no more money in arduino hardware anymore. its a fact.

business model is hard. the value is the software and libs and user content (MOSTLY user content! its all about the libraries and examples that let us all do rapid prototyping).

I bought some 328 arduino italy boards when I first started, at $30 or so, each. maybe more, I forget. but they were expensive and I stopped buying them once I could do my own boards. and now, even my own boards do not make as much sense; since I can buy a usb nanon 3.0 board for $5. sure, it has crap ftdi fake chips on it (sigh) but newer ones are using non-ftdi chips and so that's good progress.

the size of a nano v3 module is great, its all there and its hard to argue with that kind of easy integration. but no one buys italy or official nano modules. they exist and i'm sure they are better made with real parts, but they cost too much!

I hope they can find a good business model. the arduino guys did a big thing to help the world get into controllers (major game changer; they deserve full credit) but now that chinese clones are out there, the hardware side is 'solved'. sad but true.

arguing over who sells the hardware is a lose/lose game.

What is this "regular HTML video" you're talking about? I'm talking about the new HTML5 media elements, things like <video>.

And Flash has been a viable technology for implementing these kinds of features for a very long time, and still would be had it not been deliberately sabotaged by the likes of Apple and Google for their own purposes. Ignoring your apparent personal prejudice, why objectively should I as a professional web developer not have been using such tools if they get the best results for my clients?

Exactly. Sites now have to provide the same functionality twice, because the browsers have made such a mess of standardisation that you can't rely on a single implementation to actually work portably.

Unfortunately, in the real world, that is often not an option. If your client wants multimedia elements on their site, you're going to need HTML5 multimedia elements despite the fact that numerous aspects of how they work aren't standardised. And just to be clear, this is stuff that has been available in browsers for 5+ years now. It's hardly some new development, and failure to standardise effectively after such a long period is just a demonstration of how worthless some of these standardisation processes have become.

Ultimately, what matters is whether your site works in visitors' browsers. Standards are only a means to that end, and validation in turn is only useful if you have useful standards to validate against. Since a lot of the web standards today are borderline worthless due to their instability and/or their failure to specify so many aspects that make a difference in practice, validation doesn't really give you the assurance you seek of compatibility either across today's browsers or with future browsers.

Once again, I'm not saying the world wouldn't be a better place if you did have that assurance or that I agree with the path the browser makers and standards bodies have chosen to follow. I'm just saying that as a web developer you have to play the cards you've been dealt, and I don't see formal validation as improving your chances to any useful degree today.

Well, OK, so when should I expect that I can build a brochure site for a hotel that uses HTML5 videos and have one video format and one set of custom controls to work with? Because the world has moved on and Flash is no longer a viable option for this kind of work despite offering those advantages for many years, thanks to much the same browser developers who can't get their act together and actually provide a better replacement. They can't even manage to make the default "this is a video" overlay look the same, or even put it in roughly the same place so you can design placeholder graphics accordingly.

If your company's video site actually is YouTube then this kind of problem probably doesn't affect you all that much. However, for normal web sites that are just trying to take advantage of multimedia as part of the presentation, HTML5 audio and video are a bad joke, and the punchline is that all the much better technologies that used to be viable alternatives have been deliberately killed off anyway.

But this brings us back to the original question from my first post in this thread: why? What objective advantage do you or your employer/client gain by insisting on such compliance?

I do sympathise with your position, in that it should be an advantage to follow standards, and browser compatibility now and in the future should be practically guaranteed by doing so. The world would be a better place if this were the reality. But it isn't, and so pragmatically, I'd rather build web sites and apps that work than sites and apps that dogmatically tick the right boxes even though it requires more effort and offers no demonstrable benefit.

You grow hair on your palms and...nowait, that was...you know what, nevermind.

Yes, I was, and I respectfully disagree. Browsers today do a lot more, but frequently the support for newer features is so specific to each browser and in some cases so unstable that it is completely useless for real world projects, it requires silly amounts of boilerplate and prefixing (= will break at some future point you can't predict, so also useless for production sites that won't have ongoing maintenance), or at best it requires implementing something in multiple independent ways.

An example of useful standardisation would have been all browsers using the same default stylesheet. Imagine how much developer time could have been saved and how many glitches could have been avoided over the years if we had never needed things like CSS resets or Normalize.

But the point is that these non-standard-compliant implementation techniques don't break anything in practice, because every browser is tolerant of them and will always remain so because far too much would break otherwise. The only downside to not following those standards is that someone can complain you're not following their preferred standards. And someone always will, but unless it really does matter (for example, because it excludes customers and damages your bottom line, or it actually does undermine some sort of accessibility aid) you can just ignore them.

Well, fear and burning people to death so they're no longer a threat. Not very efficient, but effective.

And I guess the "practical applications" of your guns, if they don't involve fear, involve gunning people down, right? Don't bother with scaring them off, just kill them.

Between you and me, it seems like the practical application of creating fear is working just great on you, quick-draw.

lol, yeah KB not MB.

damn, how far we really have come. amazing when you think about how many orders of mag we've seen in our life time.

Genuine questions: Who do you think that would help, and why?

This kind of validation can be useful if you need to follow a standard for something to work. If browsers all followed proper de jure standards then this would offer a useful benefit for compatibility, particularly forward compatibility with future browsers.

Unfortunately, most of the major browsers today do not do this at all consistently. Even some of the people writing the standards have basically given up. (HTML5 "living standard"? Seriously? If it changes arbitrarily then it's not a standard.)

The de facto standards that actually matter are how real browsers behave, which dictate whether your page looks right in the browsers your visitors are using today. Nothing else you do today is guaranteed to work tomorrow without regular attention anyway, which is foolish regression from the situation a few years ago for which we can thank Google and Mozilla, but it's the reality all the same.

In my entire career doing Web work -- which is measured in decades -- I'm not sure I have ever seen an example where a project was objectively better off because it routinely enforced having valid mark-up and stylesheets. I have, however, seen plenty of cases where someone has deliberately deviated from W3C standards for a specific, useful reason.

For example, Google have been known to omit mark-up that they were sure wasn't necessary in any browser in order to save a few bytes. Multiply those bytes by a bazillion visitors to their site every day and that's a lot of traffic saved overall. Another common case is trendy MVC frameworks like Angular, which often use non-standard attributes on HTML elements for their own purposes. They could use standard "data-*" attributes, but once you've got a few of those sitting on many elements in your mark-up, it's just noise and excess weight, so they use their own prefix for namespacing instead. And yet, I don't see anyone claiming that either Google's search engine or Angular as a JS framework have failed as a result of these heinous crimes...

stuff like "hi, my name's romney." or "hi, my name is bush." or any other super rich person.

they really are different from the rest of us little people.

"I know he can GET the job, but can he DO the job? I'm not arguing that with you. I'm not arguing that with you!"

(memorable quote from a really funny movie)

However, we don't normally award punitive damages in civil cases here in the UK, so even if there is a definitive judgement at some stage that Google was invading privacy and failing to protect personal data, it seems unlikely they will suffer more than a token slap on the wrist from a privacy regulator provided that they cease and desist (as it appears they already have). Unfortunately, civil trials here are not very effective at recognising damage that comes in forms other than actual financial loss and doing much to compensate for it and/or discourage similar behaviour in the future.