The recent release of Safari 3.1 supports HTML 5 audio/video elements, also see HTML 5 video tag and Ogg.

It's of course good to have this support. However, unfortunately, it doesn't really get around the plugin/formats issues. For instance, Opera and Firefox seem to be supporting Ogg/Theora, while Safari will support QuickTime formats. (Though, hopefully they will also support formats playable through supported plugins, see HTML 5 video tag and Ogg.)

Cf. image element: This is useful, because all browsers understand jpg, png, gif. But this wasn't always the case, and even isn't fully the case, see http://www.libpng.org/pub/png/pngapbr.html!

But having the audio/video elements is a good thing, and will hopefully lead to some convergence!

Links:

• http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=307467
• http://www.css3.info/safari-31-pushes-css3-support-forward/ (some discussion of the tags in the comments)
• http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/a-call-for-video-on-the-web-opera-vid/
• http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2007/11/08/experimental-video-build-released-on-opera-labs
• http://webkit.org/blog/140/html5-media-support/
• http://ajaxian.com/archives/html5-media-support-video-and-audio-tags-and-scriptability
• http://www.apple.com/safari/
• http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/36515/118/

Ogg/Theora in QuickTime:

• http://xiph.org/quicktime/download.html