For a number of reasons, I’m fascinated by the fight over the tag in HTML5 as related by Ryan Paul of Ars Technica – and not just because I like the idea of not having to install a plugin to watch video online.

When you are laying out a new design for a web site, the last thing you generally want to do is create a ton of images for the layout. You might make a rounded corner or shadowed text in Photoshop, but that is wasted time if the client doesn’t like it or the website doesn’t turn out as expected.

HTML 5's support of using the Ogg Theora video format in the upcoming tag looked really promising for innovation in the web video area, but not everyone agrees on the new spec.

Spending the last two days at the Open Video Conference has been a great experience, lots of interesting speakers and I've learned a few things. Perhaps I'll write more in general later, however it's worth mentioning, while still fresh in my mind, today's sessions around royalty-free codecs and the HTML 5 tag.

"Dailymotion is excited to launch a new R&D platform dedicated to free video formats and web standards: openvideo.dailymotion.com. You don’t need the Adobe Flash plugin to watch videos on this platform - the only requirement is the latest version of Firefox, 3.5 beta, available here..."

"Mozilla's new Jetpack project makes it easy to enhance the Firefox web browser by using conventional HTML and JavaScript. In this hands-on tutorial, we introduce you to Jetpack and use it to add a Digg counter to the browser's statusbar..."

"The proliferation of standards-based video sharing and collaboration is set to take off with a $US100,000 grant from the Mozilla Foundation to fund the development of the Ogg Theora video codec and server-side streaming software.