We expect even more rapid innovation in the web media platform in the coming year and are focusing our investments in those technologies that are developed and licensed based on open web principles. To that end, we are changing Chrome’s HTML5 <video> support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project. Specifically, we are supporting the WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future. Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies. - Google's Chrome is will be joining Firefox in no longer licensing the MPEG-LA H.264 video codec favoured by Apple and Microsoft for use in the HTML5 <video> tag (previously). Not everyone is seeing this as a good thing.
posted by Artw on Jan 13, 2011 - 145 comments

Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) - a sort of image format which records shapes and lines instead of pixels - is partially supported in most web browsers but not in Internet Explorer. Javascript libraries such as dojo.gfx and Raphaël have tried to bridge the gap programmatically with impressive results but it remains difficult to simply draw something in one of the available illustration tools and display it on the web (without converting to a raster graphic as Wikipedia does.) But hope for compatibility may be on the horizon: Microsoft has just joined the W3C SVG Working Group. (previously)
posted by XMLicious on Jan 7, 2010 - 51 comments

Internet Explorer 7. Dean Edwards does what a team of developers with billions behind them apparently can't -- update IE to work with modern standards. Almost, anyway... as he says, it's still in alpha, and has its quirks, but check out the Pure CSS Menus demo, for example.
posted by weston on Jul 29, 2004 - 19 comments

MS set to drop support for Java. Isn't it great that they are so committed to standards? I wonder if they'll change Jscript or heck, why not just drop ECMA all together? ugh.
posted by bryanboyer on Apr 13, 2000 - 2 comments

The Web Standards Project blasts Microsoft's "arrogant" break with standards in IE 5.5/Windows Edition. Please read the press release and, if you agree, post it to your favorite mailing lists and news groups. This must not stand.
posted by Zeldman on Apr 10, 2000 - 5 comments