Copyright © Roddy McKay - 2010 - All Rights Reserved

After reading Steve Jobs Thoughts On Flash and hearing about the phenomenal first month sales of the iPad, I thought about the impact that this would have on the way we present media on the web. What - no flash? The first time I got my hands on an iPad and pulled up the iWeb for Musicians Music Players web pages I could see the evidence in the form of all those blank spaces where the flash players should be. Definitely no flash!

So, where do we go from here....

In general, it shouldn't be necessary to rebuild your website for the iPad although you may have to if you have mostly flash content. As long as you are using the "standard" page width of 980px your site should be fine. You may want to consider having an alternative "iPad" version of your media pages or your whole website but is this a good idea?

To be independent of plugins and be able to play media natively in the browser is a big step forward, so the introduction of HTML5 is timely to say the least. Safari and Chrome support this right now and, hopefully, this will mean the decline and demise of my sworn enemies - Internet Exploder and, of late, FirePox.

In these pages, I'm going to look at how to get audio and video to play in Safari, Chrome and Firefox. I'm not going to consider IE at all because HTML5 support is not planned until V9 and surely Microsoft will stop throwing good money after bad and quit this horrendous product.

This symbol means that the page content is of no use to MobileMe users.