The HTML

Published: 15 Nov 2021 at 17:33 +0200

We’ve had the HTML <video> element for over a decade. Yet, everyone still defaults to embedding YouTube frames instead of hosting their own videos. The underlying problem is that the <video> element isn’t suitable for embedding short video files on webpages.

This post does a good job explaining why the <video> element is so hard to work with, especially for small videos. It doesn’t have the expressiveness of the <picture> element and adding expressiveness requires at least 300kb of JavaScript which is overkill for a short video.

There was an interesting note on the poster attribute which specifies the video’s thumbnail and how it should support multiple image formats¹ and sizes.

It would be great if browser vendors could look into fixing this element because while it’s good enough to replace GIFs², it’s bad as it is right now.

You could try HTTP content negotiation for this. ↩︎
I’m making a big series on this so stay tuned. ↩︎