Why the HTML5 'Video' Element Is Effectively Unusable, Even in the Browsers Which Support It ============================================================================================ By John Gruber Monday, 21 December 2009 I seldom post video to DF, but when I do, I refuse to embed Flash,[1] I want the markup to be sane and standard, I want the video to play in popular standards-compliant web browsers, and I don't want the video to download/buffer automatically. [Here's an example from a year ago][e], using QuickTime. [e]: http://daringfireball.net/2008/04/big_fan What you see upon page load is a poster frame (a still image), then you (the user) click the poster frame to actually download and watch the video. Here's the markup I used then: That markup met all of my aforementioned desires but for one: the `` tag is not standard. Worse, it now has a new significant problem: it doesn't work at all in Chrome (at least on the Mac). So I've been [paying attention][pa] to the new [`