Why the HTML5 'Video' Element Is Effectively Unusable, Even in the Browsers Which Support It →
John Gruber on the failure of the some of the good browsers1 to respect the autobuffer
attribute of HTML5’s <video>
tag. (The same bug/feature applies to the <audio>
tag, too, which is why I haven’t yet applied the markup on my HTML5 audio test page to the ocassional audio posts here.)
Update: Christopher Blizzard of Mozilla shows that Firefox respects the spec, and a comment on his post touches on the Boolean confusion I noted on my test page–for <video>
and <audio>
, attributes like autobuffer
and controls
are true if present, and false if absent. But you can also write markup like <audio autobuffer="autobuffer">
(which is the XHTML5 way, as opposed to the HTML5 way, I suppose) or any old gubbins like <audio autobuffer="raspberryberet">
which some browsers will, on the basis of the attribute’s presence alone, take to mean that you want your media should autobuffer away.