HTML5 video is taking the web by storm.

Not only has a very public (and contentious) debate unfolded on the web about the efficacy of presenting videos using HTML5 instead of Flash, but momentum is gathering behind the nascent web standard.

From giant video sites like YouTube to Wikipedia, everyone it seems wants to get their video out of Flash and into native web formats. With Microsoft recently announcing it will support the HTML5 video tag in the coming Internet Explorer 9, expect even more sites to abandon Flash for native video.

So, you want in on the fun? Do you want to use some HTML5 video tags on your site right now? No problem. Fasten your seat belts, as we’re about to take a tour of the wonderful world of HTML5 video.

Browser Support for HTML5

First, let’s deal with some very basic stuff, like where this will work and where it won’t. As you can see in the table below, only the latest versions of most browsers support native video playback using HTML5’s <video> tag.

Since Firefox 3.0 and IE 7 & 8 lack any support for HTML5 video, you’ll have to come up with a fallback plan for serving video to those users. Depending on what you want to do you, could fallback first to Quicktime and then, failing that, to Flash. That’s the strategy used in Video for Everyone.

To keep things simple we’re just going to fall straight from HTML5 to Flash.

Formats, Codecs and Technicalities

The next thing you need to understand is what is actually happening when you load and play a video file in your web browser. You’re probably used to thinking of video as .mp4 or .mov files, but unfortunately it’s not that simple. The actual file formats are just containers. Think of them as a bit like a .zip file — they hold other stuff inside.

Each container holds at minimum one video track and, most likely, one audio track. When you watch a movie online, your video player (most likely Flash) decodes both the audio and video and sends the information to your screen and speakers.

Why does this matter? Well, because the process of decoding what’s inside the video container file varies. To know how to decode a movie, the player (which is your web browser in the case of HTML5 video) has to know which codec the movie was encoded with.

When it comes to web video there are two codecs to worry about: H.264 and Theora.

There’s a huge debate right now among web developers, browser makers and just about everyone else as to which codec is right for the web. We believe that a free, open codec without patent and licensing restrictions is the best solution for the web. Sadly, neither codec exactly fulfills that dream, so for now, let’s just skip the whole argument and be practical — we’re going to use both codecs.

Why? Well, have a look at the table below, which shows which codecs work where and you’ll quickly see that there is no one-size-fits-all-browsers solution. Only Google Chrome can play both H.264 and Theora.

So, you may be thinking … if HTML5 video doesn’t work in IE7 or IE8 and it means I’m going to have to encode my videos twice, then why bother at all? Well, the best answer is simple: mobile users. If you want iPhone and Android users to be able to see your video, HTML5 is the only way to do it — Flash support is coming to Android sooner or later but for now HTML5 is the only option, and we all know Flash doesn’t run on the iPhone or the iPad.

The HTML5 Code

Here’s how to actually embed your videos. First, we encode video in both .ogv and .mp4 containers. Encoding video is beyond the scope of this article, so instead we suggest you check out Mark Pilgrim’s online book Dive Into HTML5, which has a whole chapter devoted to understanding video encoding. Pilgrim’s encoding suggestions use free software to get the job done, and in the end you’ll have two files — one .mp4 and one .ogv.

Now it’s time to unleash those movies in pure HTML glory. Here’s the code:

<video width="560" height="340" controls>
  <source src="path/to/myvideo.ogv" type='video/ogg; codecs="theora, vorbis"'>
  <source src="path/to/myvideo.mp4" type='video/mp4; codecs="avc1.42E01E, mp4a.40.2"'>
</video>

Yes, that’s it. What we’ve done here is use the <video> tag to specify the dimensions of our video, and to denote that we want to use the browser’s default controls. Then, within the video tag, we’ve added two <source> elements which link to our video files.

The “type” attribute of the <source> tag helps the browser understand which file it should load. It’s a bit of an ugly chunk of code that needs to specify the container format, the video codec and the audio codec.

In this case we’ve assumed standard .ogv and baseline encoded H.264 video as per Pilgrim’s tutorial. See the WHATWG wiki for more information on which video types you can specify.

And there you have it — native web video, no plugins required.

Dealing With Everyone Else

What about IE7, IE8 and older versions of just about any other browser? Well, for those users, we’ll fall back on Flash. To do that, we just use an <embed> tag within our video tag:

<video width="560" height="340" controls>
  <source src="path/to/myvideo.ogv" type='video/ogg; codecs="theora, vorbis"'>
  <source src="path/to/myvideo.mp4" type='video/mp4; codecs="avc1.42E01E, mp4a.40.2"'>
  <object width="640" height="384" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
		data="path/to/swf/player.swf?image=placeholder.jpg&file=path/to/myvideo.mp4">
		<param name="movie" value="path/to/swf/player.swf?image=placeholder.jpg&file=path/to/myvideo.mp4" />
	</object>
</video>

Now any browser that doesn’t understand the HTML5 video tag will just continue on its way until it hits the object tag, which it should understand.

Of course for this to work you need a Flash video container. JW Player is one popular example, or you can roll your own using Adobe’s tools. Also remember that we still haven’t handled the case of an older version of Firefox with no Flash plugin installed (maybe your users are surfing your tubes with an outdated Linux machine). You can always add good old text-based links to the video files as a catch-all fix for anyone who can’t, for whatever reason, see either the HTML5 or Flash versions.

Conclusion

Embedding HTML5 video isn’t significantly more difficult than using Flash, especially if you’ve been using H.264 video files in your Flash player — which is exactly what YouTube has done with its HTML5 beta.

While we’re concerned about the licensing and patent requirements of H.264, it isn’t hard to notice that if you skip Theora and make all non-H.264 fall back to Flash, you’ve still saved yourself a considerable encoding headache. In fact, that’s probably the best practical argument against Mozilla and Opera’s refusal to support H.264.

If you’d like to use some of the more advanced aspects of HTML5 video, be sure to check the SublimeVideo player, which offers very nice JavaScript-powered set of custom controls. Also be sure to have a look at Video for Everybody, which makes for more complex code but handles just about every use case you could imagine. And there’s a handy Video for Everybody WordPress plugin as well.

See Also:

• Building Web Pages With HTML5
• Add Semantic Value to Your Pages With HTML5
• Who Needs Flash?

HTML5 does way more than video: Vimeo’s Flash-free player showing a clip by Maxime Bruneel.

Unless you’ve been off snorkeling in the Alps, you’ve probably heard all the recent hubbub about HTML5 and its ability to replace Flash as the web’s default video player.

But HTML5 is much more than a hopeful successor to Flash’s web-video crown. In fact, watching a video without a plug-in only scratches the surface of what HTML5 offers.

HTML5 is the next generation of HTML, the language of the web. More than just a markup syntax like its predecessors, HTML5 provides a new set of features designed to make modern web applications work more like desktop applications.

The key features in the HTML5 stack: native video and audio playback, animated graphics, geolocation, hardware acceleration for in-browser events, the ability to keep using a browser-based app even if your internet connection drops, the ability to store application data on your local machine, dragging and dropping of files from the desktop to the browser, and the addition of semantic markup on pages, making them easier for both machines and humans to understand.

Each of the major browsers supports different pieces of HTML5 right now, and we expect to see all browsers on the same page in a year or two. You might think, given variances in browser support, that no one is using the future of the web. But you’d be wrong. HTML5 is everywhere you turn. In fact, some of our favorite web apps are making heavy use of HTML5 — to paraphrase William Gibson, the future of the web is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed yet.

Did you know that Google’s homepage, one of the most trafficked pages on the web, uses HTML5? Technically, the Google homepage just uses the HTML5 doctype — the rest of the page is actually quite archaic (and invalid) code — but other Google apps take advantage of HTML5 much more.

Gmail, one of the bigger webmail apps on the web, uses HTML5’s offline storage mechanism to allow you to work with your e-mail even when you don’t have an internet connection. Google Docs also uses the HTML5 offline tools, as do the online office suite Zoho and the WordPress blogging system. Check out Mark Pilgrim’s excellent rundown on how to add offline support to your apps if you want to start using this feature).

Scribd’s new document reader: all web standards, no Flash.

Aside from video, HTML5 is replacing Flash in other ways. Document sharing site Scribd recently made a splash by announcing it will be switching its document viewer from Flash to HTML5 and web standards. Scribd is a great example of what is possible when combining HTML5 elements (primarily the Canvas element, which powers animations) with attendant tools like cascading stylesheets. Scribd makes especially nice use of the @font-face element to load fancy fonts, and it uses the new CSS 3 standard to power some animated transitions between pages.

The combination of tools allows Scribd to convert PDF files into pure HTML documents while maintaining the structural layout, fonts, embedded images and layered elements of the original.

Most impressive about Scribd’s new HTML5 features? They even work in IE6. Check out this example, which manages to render even complex mathematical equations in pure HTML.

They came from space, and the W3C spec: Canvas Invaders

While Scribd might have the best implementation of the canvas element we’ve seen, there are plenty of other very cool examples already on the web. The site Canvas Demos has collection of experiments with canvas, showcasing everything from online games to apps like Rainbow, a browser extension that can pull any color out of a website.

Probably the best-known examples of HTML5 on the web are the current video experiments by YouTube and Vimeo. In both cases, the HTML5 versions of the sites are still opt-in, and there’s no code to embed the HTML5 version of a video on your own site, but it’s a start.

Another aspect of HTML5 that browsers are beginning to support is a set of geolocation tools. Technically, the geolocation API is not part of the HTML5 spec, but it is governed by the W3C and will arrive alongside HTML5 the markup spec. Using the geolocation API, a web app running in the browser can obtain your whereabouts, making location-based web searches more relevant.

Click on the little circle above the yellow guy to tell Google Maps where you are.

Google Maps uses it. The site’s interface now offers a small circle icon just below the navigation wheel — click it and maps will zoom to your current location.

At the moment, the geolocation API isn’t widely supported by desktop browsers (only Chrome and Firefox 3.6+), but Google makes a plug-in called Gears which offers a fallback solution for older browsers.

That’s the tactic Twitter uses for its geo-aware tweets, tapping into the geolocation API when it’s available and falling back to Gears when it’s not.

In the end, one of the most powerful changes in HTML5 may not be as flashy as any of the examples listed above. HTML5’s biggest contribution to the web may well end up being its new structural tags, like <header>, <footer>, <section> and <article>.

These new tags allow web authors to better define their content, which means search engines will need to do a lot less guessing when they index the web. That will mean better, more relevant results and faster links to the information you want.

There are countless sites already using HTML5’s new tags, though you’d never know it without viewing the source of the pages. If you’d like to see some examples, head over to HTML5Gallery, which features hundreds of sites using varying degrees of HTML5.

To use the new structural tags on your own site, check out our tutorial on Building Web Pages With HTML 5. And there’s no need to worry; with a little JavaScript helper, these tags will work in any browser.

HTML5 can also be extended to offer even more semantic structure through Microdata. Using standardized data formats (similar in many ways to microformats) websites can offer not only data, but definitions of what that data is.

Ultimately, microdata exists for the benefit of web browsers and search engines. Eventually, search engines could use microdata to find your friends on the web and browsers could use it to connect you with those friends no matter what flavor-of-the-month social site they might be using. To experiment with these extensions, head over to Google’s Rich Snippets Testing Tool.

While there’s no question that HTML5 is still in the experimental stage, it’s already gaining traction, and it’s doing a whole lot more than just playing video on your mobile phone.

See Also:

• Embed Videos in Your Web Pages Using HTML5
• Building Web Pages With HTML5
• Add Semantic Value to Your Pages With HTML5
• Who Needs Flash?

If you list it, will they come? The Lansing family hopes so.

The Des Moines Register is reporting that the Iowa site where the 1980 movie “Field of Dreams” was shot, is on the market for $5.4 million. Included in the price is the actual movie site which includes the baseball field, a two-bedroom, 1.5-bath house (and yes, that familiar front porch), surrounding farmland, two souvenir stands and six farm buildings — a total of 193 acres.

Maybe the movie’s star, Kevin Costner, needs a place to retire?

Mortgage rates for 30-year fixed mortgages fell this week, with the current rate borrowers were quoted on Zillow Mortgage Marketplace at 4.70%, down from 4.79% at this same time last week. The 30-year fixed mortgage rate spiked early Friday to around 4.82 percent before falling to 4.70 today.  The last time the 30-year fixed mortgage rate was this low was in early December 2009.

Half of a percentage point in a 30-year fixed loan can save the buyer of a $300,000 home more than $26,000 over the life of the loan.

Additionally, the 15-year fixed mortgage rate on Tuesday morning was 4.13% and for 5/1 ARMs, the rate was 3.44%.

What are the rates right now? Check Zillow Mortgage Marketplace for up-to-the-minute mortgage rates for your state.

This May, get educated with FREE RMLSweb training

Here’s a quick rundown of upcoming real estate events & education for May in Oregon & Southern Washington. If you have an event that is not listed here, please let us know by commenting below. For future events, please send an e-mail to communications (at) rmls (dot) com.

Events around the Region:

-Through May 30: Prudential Real Estate Professionals offers its CRS111 Short Sales and Foreclosures course held on July 1st. Discounted registration is available until May 30th.

-May 3: Clark County Association of Realtors® offers Get Connected Boot Camp for FREE admission

-May 17: Clatsop Association of Realtors® co-presents Issues with Short Sales, Loan Modifications and Foreclosure Rescue in Seaside, Oregon

-May 19: PMAR® offers the Navigating the Realtor® Code of Ethics training seminar

-May 20-21: OAR® presents The Accredited Buyer’s Representative®, a two-day course series at the Oregon Convention Center

-May 23: Vancouver Fine Homes Group hosts the Vancouver Fine Homes Spring Tour

-May 26, 27: Earth Advantage offers Sustainability Training for Accredited Real Estate Professionals

Also, if you’re an RMLS™ subscriber, we have lots of FREE opportunities for continuing education credit at a location near you; click the link for your area to view the May Training Calendar:

- Coos County
- Eastern Oregon
- Eugene
- Florence
- Gresham
- Hood River
- Portland
- Roseburg
- Salem
- Vancouver

The key to a successful real estate blog is generating and
maintaining your blog’s position as an authority on real estate in your farm
area. A great way to do this is to connect with other real estate professionals
and potential clients through various social networks on the web. So what is a
social network? For those that don’t know, a social network is an online
community centered around a common interest. A very well-known example of a
social network is MySpace, www.myspace.com. While social networks may not
sound very business-like, they are valuable tools you should use to generate
traffic to your site. There are many professional social networks these days,
many not worth joining. Here
is a list of the five social networks all real estate professionals should
join:

• ActiveRain
  (www.activerain.com)-This is a community of real estate
  professionals that share real estate and mortgage information via their
  ActiveRain blogs. Membership is free to this site and the maintenance of a
  blog on ActiveRain can generate new business contacts and partnerships as
  well as increased traffic to your blog site.

• Squidoo (www.squidoo.com)-This
  site is a network of member sites called “lenses”. Each member creates a
  “lens” on a particular subject. As a real estate professional, you would
  create a lens based on real estate in your farm area. Membership is free
  to this site. A well-maintained lens can obtain its own traffic and
  generate ad revenue for you as well as drive additional traffic to your
  blog site.

• HubPages (www.hubpages.com)-This
  site is very similar to Squidoo. It is a network of member sites called
  “hubs”. You will create a “hub” for real estate in your farm area. Membership
  is free to this site. A well-maintained hub will generate traffic and ad
  revenue for you and your blog site.

• Facebook (www.facebook.com)-This
  is a well-known social network that was originally centered on connecting
  college students across the country. Now it has been expanded for use to
  people of all ages and businesses use it for promotion of their brand.
  Create a free profile for your real estate business and include a link to
  your blog site.

• Twitter (www.twitter.com)-This
  is a micro-blogging service that is based around one question:”What Are
  You Doing?” By answering this question and updating your Twitter account
  each time you make a new post to your blog site, you will attract
  “followers” that can later turn into leads.

Maintaining these sites and profiles may seem like a lot
of extra work but there are ways to simplify that process. Here
are a couple of tips to make updating your social network profiles and pages
easy:

• Sign up for Ping.fm (www.ping.fm). You
  can update your Twitter and Facebook accounts right in one place. You can
  post new status messages here-include links to recent blog posts and any
  videos you may have on the web for additional exposure.

• Recycle blog posts for use on
  your ActiveRain blog, Squidoo lens, and HubPages Hub. Do
  this by rewriting an old blog post, making sure that it is different from
  the original by at least 30%. Post your rewritten posts to the other
  sites. This process makes sure that all of your sites are being updated
  regularly with fresh content.

To further maximize the buzz on your blog, consider the
use of FriendFeed (www.friendfeed.com).
FriendFeed gathers all of your updates to your various social network accounts
and creates an automatically updating feed that you can use on your blog site.
By creating a FriendFeed and implementing it on the home page of your blog
site, you can significantly increase your sites importance in the search
engines and get enhanced results.

For more information and additional tips on using social networking to promote your real estate blog, check out these great articles:

Problogger – How to Promote Your Blog through Networking

Kikolani – 9 Ways to Use Social Networking for Blog Promotion

Chris Brogan – Nine Ways to Promote Your Blog Posts

As a professional bio writer, I often get asked “how do I write a bio when I don’t have direct experience in the business?”

Don’t sweat it! I can tell you that your realtor bio is not necessarily JUST about your industry experience. More than anything, readers want to know that you:

1) know the local market;
2) understand the client’s needs;
3) are going to work hard for them.

And you can satisfy each of these criteria even if you are brand new to the real estate business.

Let’s take each of these client concerns and see what you can write in your professional bio that will wow them.

1. You know the local market.

OK, so maybe you don’t have 20 years experience as a realtor in the community. But you live in the community, right?

So talk about what your connection to the community: the hidden gems you treasure, the groups you’re involved with, or the networks you belong to.

Whereas an experienced realtor might write about their twenty years experience as a real estate agent, a brand new realtor can write:

Jane has lived in Townville for X years and just loves it. She knows all the neighbourhoods inside-out, and can help you select the best one for your family’s needs.

OR

As a lifelong resident of Mayberry, Andy can put his insider knowledge to work to find a special property in your neighbourhood of choice.

You’re showing that you know the local market, and the client won’t care how many years of experience you have.

2. You understand the client’s needs.

What do people really want when they are buying or selling real estate? They want an agent who will help them meet their needs. These needs might include understanding exactly what they mean by “cozy home”, having a particular type of business style, or using the latest marketing tools.

So how do you express this in your realtor bio? You might say something like:

Andy also uses the latest Internet marketing tools to expose your property to the widest possible range of qualified buyers.

3. You are going to work hard for them.

When thinking about how to write a bio, remember that the bottom line for clients is “are you the right real estate agent for me?” Often this translates into “Do I like you?”

So don’t forget about the personal qualities that qualify you for the job. People reading your real estate bio will feel confident knowing that you are pleasant, professional, hard-working, enthusiastic and organized.

Here’s one way to write this in your professional bio:

Why choose Jane as your real estate agent? For one thing, she really listens to you and will work tirelessly on your behalf.

Trust me, it makes all the difference when trying to sell yourself to show who you are and why you are enthusiastic about the topic.

You don’t need decades of experience and a wall of awards to write a winning real estate bio. Just show that you know the local market, understand the client’s needs, and are going to work hard for them. Then you’ll have a great professional bio that will be a strong part of your marketing materials.

About the author: Barbra Sundquist is an experienced technical writer and business coach who provides fill-in-the-blank templates for how to write a bio. Visit HowToWriteBio.com to get your free copy of “84 Sentence Starters for Writing A Bio”.

In this day and age when the hot topic seems to be about foreclosures and short sales, here is a question from servinghim in Anaheim Hills, CA, who asks in Zillow Advice:

How badly does a short sale affect your credit rating?

As usual, there are plenty of good answers and advice.

Mozilla has an answer to site-centric identity systems like Facebook’s — put the browser in charge of your online logins instead.

The Mozilla Labs project called Account Manager has graduated from Labs and will soon be making its way into Firefox proper.

Account Manager allows you to log in and out of websites directly through the browser, rather than relying on a particular site’s login form. Using a new menu item in the main toolbar — a button with a picture of a key that sits next to the address field — Account Manager lets you pick a login to use at any site you visit. It stores logins you’ve already created, suggesting them whenever they can be used. It can also generate (and remember) random passwords to make your logins more secure. It’s a radical step up from Firefox’s current Password Manager feature.

Mozilla’s decision to put this new button directly into Firefox’s toolbar brings us one step closer to realizing a ubiquitous social network on the web, where you’re logged in and connected to your friends wherever you go. All the while, you remain in total control of your own identity since you can tinker with all of your logins and connections through some simple panels in the browser.

There’s no word yet on when this will make it into Firefox, but we may see it as soon as Firefox 4, which is due in early 2011. For now, Account Manager is separate add-on you can grab from the Mozilla website. The add-on is still a beta release and there are some known bugs, but in our testing, it performed as advertised.

At the moment, Account Manager works with Google, Yahoo, Facebook and several Mozilla sites. Mozilla is planning to add support for other authentication systems, including OpenID, in the near future. The post on Mozilla Hacks also has instructions for site owners that let them add support for Account Manager with “only 15 minutes of hacking,” though we suspect it will become easier to implement support once the spec is fully formed.

There are several advantages to letting the browser handle logins. The most obvious is that the login form is always in the same place, with the same user interface regardless of which site you’re on, which would make the login experience easier for less-savvy users. Such a feature is also particularly useful if you have multiple accounts on a single site (all too common with the explosion of social networking) and need an easy way to choose which account to sign in with. It also means that, for example, Firefox could implement a sort of “fast user switching” feature that would let you change Facebook accounts with just a click. Ditto for Gmail, Twitter or any other supported website.

Along with its Contacts and Weave projects, Account Manager is part of a larger effort to make Firefox a central part of your online identity. Mozilla calls this its Online Identity Concept Series. It is being developed at a time when web identity is under renewed scrutiny, with Facebook’s announcement last week of its Open Graph protocol for sharing content across websites, and its adoption of new technologies to let people use their Facebook accounts to log in to other sites on the web. Twitter also launched a web-wide sharing feature called @anywhere, which builds on the some of the same identity technologies adopted by Facebook.

Once Mozilla gets all three of its identity projects working together, you would be able to login, discover friends on new websites and sync all your data across computers, effectively eliminating the need for a centralized system like Facebook’s or Twitter’s by handing the job of making connections off to the browser. You could still use whatever login system you like, but you wouldn’t be reliant on any single provider.

And according to insiders, this path makes total sense.

Chris Messina, an OpenID Foundation board member and a longtime advocate of open web technologies, recently posted a video series outlining the work he did with Mozilla last fall to build identity management into the browser (Messina has since taken a job at Google).

“A browser is usually called a user agent, and the idea is that it’s software or a program that acts on your behalf,” Messina says in his post.

If your browser knows who you are, and who your friends are, it can show you photos or status updates posted by your friends, plus other types of social interactions.

“By layering in concepts like identity, the hope is to upgrade the browser into something that is more personal,” he says.

At Facebook’s F8 developer conference last week, Raffi Krikorian from Twitter was speaking on a panel about identity technologies, and when the conversation turned to whether or not the browser should handle logins and social connections, he agreed that such a development would be “a huge step forward for the web.”

“Since the browser exists in between the web service and the user, it makes perfect sense for the browser to handle those identity-management tasks,” Krikorian said.

Thus far, that is still a ways from reality, but with Account Manager out of Labs and headed into Firefox proper, Mozilla is getting closer to this goal.

If you’d like to add support for Account Manager to your own website, be sure to check out the post on Mozilla Hacks which walks you through the steps. It’s not overly complicated, but you will need to be familiar with JSON.

See Also:

• Mozilla Contacts Helps Firefox Discover Your Social Web
• Facebook Adopts Open Standard for User Logins
• Mozilla Labs Seeks to Tame Your Address Book With ‘Contacts’
• Warning: This Site May Be Sharing Your Data

RMLSweb has been updated with some new and exciting features:

1) Electronic input forms are now available in several formats on RMLSweb. Take a look at the Listing Input Forms Change Summary to see all changes.

2) In client and agent reports, most city and county names are now links to local municipalities for that area

3) Short Sale Yes/No, Short Sale Offer Yes/No and Energy Efficiency have been added to the Export Residential Report. Distance to BLM has also been added to the Export Farms and Ranches Report.

4) All Room Features field is now available in Advanced Search