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So, there's a new Spinal Tap short.
Though, this post isn't about Spinal Tap. This post is about what it means to be cross-platform compatible. You see, if you follow the above link, you should find another link in there to watch the video, hosted by MSN. Exhibit A and Exhibit B show how the MSN video page looks in IE and Firefox, respectively.
You might notice that in Exhibit B, it looks as if firefox is playing windows media. There's Windows Media-esque player controls and a video. Non-IE browsers get a Flash-based player to play FLV versions of the video (similar in nature to Google Video and YouTube).
Why is this? Windows Media Player only really truly works in IE. That is, even though you can embed windows media player into an HTML document in most browsers/platforms (even on the mac!), you can't interact with the player through the use of Javascript in non-IE browsers. So, to ensure compatibility MSN...
The sad part in all of this? If they just broke down and admitted that their own solution isn't compatible, using the Flash-only version of stuff will handle ALL of their compatibility issues. There's no need for WMV if you're going through all of the trouble to do it in FLV for the 20% or so for whom WMV doesn't work.
In other news, because I like beating dead horses. If you check out the videos for Final Cut Studio. You might notice that the video plays across IE and Firefox with a consistent look-and-feel using Quicktime and DHTML/Javascript player controls. The same could easily be accomplished using FLV.
Bonus trivia: They also use Prototype to handle the nifty rollover effects.
OpenLaszlo programs are written in XML and JavaScript and transparently compiled to Flash and, with OpenLaszlo 4, DHTML.Might be an interesting alternative to Flex and Silverlight.
jQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.
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