Before any implementation of the HTML5 audio and video tags can
take place it's important to look at the history of multimedia
across the web. Mutlimedia in web pages originated with MIDI
sounds files and animated GIFs. As bandwidth and connection
speeds got faster, compression of files had improved and real
video and MP3 music began to pick up. Different companies
quickly started to develop different playback systems including
Real Player and Windows Media player but the emering success
came in 2005: Adobe Flash, which uses a plugin and was the
playback system of choice for the video streaming conqeruer of
the web: Youtube. In 2007, Anne van Kesteren wrote to the
Working Group about a new 'native' implementation Opera has some
internal experimental builds with an implementation of a
element. The element exposes a simple API (for the moment) much
like the Audio() object: play(), pause(), stop(). The idea is
that it works like except that it has special <video> semantics
much like has image semantics. While th