Comfortable Disappearance

Opera is one of the most progressive browser developers today. They make browsers for phones, various other devices, including the Nintendo Wii, and of course browsers for your computer.

Opera is also participating in the One Laptop Per Child program, an effort to make very reasonably priced, yet still very functional laptops available to “developing” countries. While I have some reservations about that project, I still think it’s mostly a good effort and I recognize that Opera has devoted a lot of resources, both monetary and non-monetary to it.

All of this is slightly beside the point of this post however. While reading this piece about Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie’s visit to the folks at Wired about the OLPC project, Michael Calore mentions:

Opera has developed a working internal demo of the <video> HTML element. Håkon is also pushing for browsers to support playback of the open Ogg Theora video format. He wants to see videos easily embeddable in HTML pages, and the ability for videos to be played back within the browser without proprietary plug-ins.

Why should I care, you may ask. Well, you don’t have to, except that if <video> would become part of the HTML specifications AND all browsers would support it (Firefox, Opera, Netscape, Internet Explorer - yeah right!), life would be made much easier for web developers, because we wouldn’t have to use our current mess of code to put nice, pretty videos on web pages.

Where would we be without wishful thinking?