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.