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"Danny O'Brien from the EFF has a weblog post about how the Encrypted Media Extension (EME) proposal will continue to be part of HTML Work Group's bailiwick and may make it into a future HTML revision." From O'Brien's post: "A Web where you cannot cut and paste text; where your browser can't 'Save As...' an image; where the 'allowed' uses of saved files are monitored beyond the browser; where JavaScript is sealed away in opaque tombs; and maybe even where we can no longer effectively 'View Source' on some sites, is a very different Web from the one we have today. It's a Web where user agents—browsers—must navigate a nest of enforced duties every time they visit a page. It's a place where the next Tim Berners-Lee or Mozilla, if they were building a new browser from scratch, couldn't just look up the details of all the 'Web' technologies. They'd have to negotiate and sign compliance agreements with a raft of DRM providers just to be fully standards-compliant and interoperable."

At the company's Up North Web press event here, CTO Haakon Wium Lie showed off a new standard he proposed that could give Web pages more of the feel of printed pages. A document too big for a single screen, instead of getting a scroll bar, would be split across several pages, and people can navigate among them with gestures--swiping left and right to go forward and backward or swiping up to return to an earlier page. "Doing pages on a screen I think will be very important, especially for tablets," he said.

HTML (short for the "Hyper Text Markup Language") is one of the underpinnings technologies of the modern web with the lion's share of web users' Internet activities founded on it. For nearly two decades HTML has worked well while undergoning a number of changes in response to the growing requirements of web users and vendors. It now stands on the brink of the next change -- the coming of HTML 5. At present, the Internet already contains a handful of HTML 5 specification outlines which partially cover HTML 5 features and conceptions. In this article, we review the current state of HTML and describe the most significant HTML 5 innovations.

1. Google will be releasing VP8 under an open source and royalty-free basis. VP8 is a high-quality video codec that Google acquired when they purchased the company On2. The VP8 codec represents a vast improvement in quality-per-bit over Theora and is comparable in quality to H.264. 2. The VP8 codec will be combined with the Vorbis audio codec and a subset of the Matroska container format to build a new standard for Open Video on the web called WebM. You can find out more about the project at its new site: http://www.webmproject.org/. 3. We will include support for WebM in Firefox. You can get super-early WebM builds of Firefox 4 pre-alpha today. WebM will also be included in Google Chrome and Opera. 4. Every video on YouTube will be transcoded into WebM. They have about 1.2 million videos available today and will be working through their back catalog over time. But they have committed to supporting everything. 5. This is something that is supported by many partners, not just Google and others. Content providers like Brightcove have signed up to support WebM as part of a full HTML5 video solution. Hardware companies, encoding providers and other parts of the video stack are all part of the list of companies backing WebM. Even Adobe will be supporting WebM in Flash. Firefox, with its market share and principled leadership and YouTube, with its video reach are the most important partners in this solution, but we are only a small part of the larger ecosystem of video.