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Rich Media | Web Directions

Rich Media

• About the Survey
• The Audience
• Operating Systems and Browsers
• Markup
• CSS and Presentation
• JavaScript and the DOM
• Rich Media
• Server tech­nolo­gies
• The Cloud
• Conclusions and predictions

With both Microsoft and Adobe putting con­sid­er­able energy into their respec­tive mul­ti­me­dia for­mats, Silverlight and Flash, and the rise of web based video, dri­ven in part by the pop­u­lar­ity of YouTube, as well as the increas­ing adop­tion of broad­band around the world, we wanted to get a sense of the extent to which devel­op­ers were using this kind of con­tent, how they were using it, and what for­mats they were using.

Since the 2008 Survey, the HTML5 video and audio ele­ments have become increas­ingly sup­ported in cur­rent browsers, while there’s con­sid­er­able con­tention as to which video and audio “codecs” should be natively sup­ported by browsers. As well, the lack of sup­port for Flash (and Silverlight) by Mobile Safari has become a very hot topic among web devel­op­ers. For this sur­vey, we expanded the range of ques­tions and options to get a bet­ter sense of how respon­dents are adapt­ing to this chang­ing landscape.

We first asked Do you incor­po­rate media into your sites other than HTML, CSS, Javascript and images (for exam­ple, Audio, Video, Flash or Silverlight)?. The result was up a small but sig­nif­i­cant amount from the pre­vi­ous sur­vey, with 67.5%, up from 62.8% answer­ing in the affirmative.

Do you incor­po­rate media into your sites other than HTML, CSS, Javascript and images (for exam­ple, Audio, Video, Flash or Silverlight)?

2010

AnswerCount%Yes94667.48%No31522.47%

2008

AnswerCount%Yes77462.72%No33927.47%

As with the pre­vi­ous sur­vey, we then asked of those who answered yes which for­mats they use. Comparing this year’s responses to the pre­vi­ous survey’s is dif­fi­cult, as we expanded the range of options for this sur­vey. Some obser­va­tions we can make include

• Flash main­tains its dom­i­nance with around 60% of all respon­dents nom­i­nat­ing this as a for­mat they use.
• Silverlight, while up from 2.1% to 3.6%, still has a long way to go to get remotely sim­i­lar mind­share to Flash among respondents
• YouTube leads as the stan­dard way to embed video con­tent, at 42% of respon­dents, but Vimeo has a very healthy 27%

For the next sur­vey, hope­fully we can refine our ques­tion­ing to get a clearer sense of the for­mats respon­dents are using to embed content.

Which kinds of con­tent do you use?

2010

TypeCount%Flash82959.13%Silverlight513.64%Quicktime23116.48%Real100.71%H.26418813.41%Ogg Theora/​Vorbis443.14%MP333023.54%Windows Media664.71%AVI533.78%Embedded Vimeo Content37726.89%Embedded YouTube Content59142.15%Other463.28%

2008

AnswerCount%Flash75761.35%Silverlight262.11%Quicktime24219.61%Real252.03%Others221.78%

As impor­tant as the for­mats that respon­dents are using are the uses to which they are putting this con­tent. To this end, we asked “What do you use this kind of con­tent for?”

• 64%, up from just under 60% said Video
• At 39%, almost an iden­ti­cal per­cent­age to last year said audio (respon­dents could choose more than one option)
• 17.7%, down from 22% said “Embedded games and other inter­ac­tive applications”
• Only 4.2%, down from 6.7% said “whole sites” (which is still higher than might be expected)

What do you use this kind of con­tent for?

2010

TypeCount%Audio55439.51%Video90064.19%Embedded games and other inter­ac­tive applications24817.69%Whole sites594.21%

2008

AnswerCount%Audio48339.14%Video72959.08%Embedded games and other inter­ac­tive applications27222.04%Whole sites836.73%

HTML5 Media Content

HTML5 intro­duces two new media spe­cific ele­ments, video and audio, for embed­ding this kind of con­tent. In addi­tion, devel­op­ers have long used the HTML object ele­ment, or the non-​​standard but widely used embed ele­ment to embed video, audio and other such con­tent. This year we asked respon­dents how they include such con­tent in their sites.

The object ele­ment, the stan­dards based, though tra­di­tion­ally at times chal­leng­ing way to include such con­tent was used by 46.7% of respon­dents. The embed ele­ment, which HTML5 pro­poses to stan­dard­ize for the first time due to its wide­spread use was nom­i­nated by 32.2% of respon­dents, while HTML5 ele­ments were nomi­ated by 9% of respon­dents, a very healthy result for an approach only recently sup­ported in browsers, and not in Internet Explorer.

The ongo­ing use of the never stan­dard­ized embed ele­ment is cited as the rea­son that HTML5 is propos­ing to include this ele­ment for the first time in an offi­cial ver­sion of HTML. These results raise the ques­tion of whether essen­tially bless­ing the use of the ele­ment, and so adding yet another way to offi­cially include media in HTML is actu­ally unnecessary.

How do you include this kind of con­tent in your sites?

2010

MethodCount%Primarily or always the object element65446.65%Primarily or always the embed element45132.17%HTML5 audio/​video ele­ment (with fall­backs where necessary)1268.99%

As the web becomes an ever more rich media expe­ri­ence, how devel­op­ers add this kind of con­tent to their sites is shap­ing up as an increas­ingly inter­est­ing issue. Apple’s posi­tion on Flash (and other plug in based con­tent like Silverlight) in Mobile Safari, the ongo­ing uncer­tainty about video patents and in par­tic­u­lar video codecs like H.264, Google’s recent announce­ments regard­ing sup­port of Ogg for­mats, and their open source projects in rela­tion to the VP8 vdieo codec they recently acquired mean that this issue may yet take some time to play out. We’ll con­tinue to track devel­oper prac­tices in future surveys.

Next

Next, in our next sec­tion, we’ll take a look at the server side tech­nolo­gies respon­dents use.