My new $50 Microsoft Arc keyboard has an Escape key upper left, a Delete key upper right, and every keystroke in the composite keyboard layout between and below clicks back an audible (if illusory) assurance of accomplishment.  My new $500 Apple iPad, on the other hand, has no Escape key, no Delete key, and a virtual keyboard that is consistent in neither layout nor availability.  And yes, I know it's high-tech taboo to point out the irritations in innovation.  With all the layout variants afforded by virtualization, however, you'd think they could've at least Inserted (also missing!) Delete and Escape keys somewhere in the mix.  But I digress...

The reality is that there is no Escape from the iPad.  And by that, I do not mean merely its apps or interface.  Nor do I here bemoan that (like the Arc) the iPad is a product of migrated manufacturing "developed" in America and "assembled" in China, as the mandatory microlabel on its backside makes manifest.  What I mean is that the iPad is not so much profoundly revolutionary as predictably evolutionary.  And I refer not only to the programmatic progression of Apple Computer's "sell'em the razors and the blades" marketing strategy ... but also to the inexorable advancement of World Wide Web Consortium ("W3C") standards for content, format and accessibility ... and to the functional adherence thereto that empirical observation suggests Chairman Jobs may demand more so from competitive products than his own.  Case in point:

With its recent introduction the iPad was heralded as a W3C standards-based device, encouraging if not requiring compliance with HTML5 in general and support for HTML5 video and audio in particular while dropping Adobe Flash altogether.  It is as if a line were drawn in the sand with Apple on one side, Adobe on the other, and website owners and developers expected to ally with one or the other.  But choosing the one means alienating advocates of the other, and we didn't see that as good business for anyone except maybe Apple.  We decided instead to support both--HTML5 video/audio as well as Flash--and we developed the VA4Most.js™ freeware Javascript utility to accomplish just that.

As the online marketing websites WebReDesignMiami.com and PervasivePersuasion.com before it will attest, our Miami web design boutique has for years promoted the benefits of W3C standards compliance and practiced what we preached.  So naturally, we were pleased to see that by making clean HTML5 and CSS3 a key component of being "iPad Ready", Apple was forcing the issue.  But practically, we do not expect our web design clients and their user base to abandon proprietary plugins like Flash or FLV media overnight.  So our approach with VA4Most is to support Flash for what's now, support HTML5 video and audio for what's next, and facilitate the transition from one to the other.

As we explain at VA4Most.WebReDesignMiami.com, our freeware may not be the first combined open/proprietary, HTML5/Flash and Apple/Adobe web video/audio embedded media alternative.  It is, however, the first of its kind to pass all seven tests of "Web 3.0 Readiness". This means, among other things, that web pages serving up video or audio can leverage VA4Most to qualify as "iPad Ready" today with no changes needed when browsers like Internet Explorer 9 add native HTML5 video and audio functionality tomorrow. 

For browsers that do not yet support HTML5 audio/video (including proper buffering and click-to-play poster functionality), VA4Most incorporates Adobe Flash Detection and leverages jQuery to deliver as dual flash fallback the rich open source functionality of FlowPlayer and SoundManager2.  A secondary source link fallback enables site surfers to download and experience MP4 (H.264/AAC), OGG (theora/vorbis), FLV (flash video) and other video formats plus MP3, OGG and WAV audio even if Javascript or Flash are disabled in their browsers.  

VA4Most.js has been successfully tested using the latest Windows versions of the Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari web browsers, and also using Safari on the iPad Wi-Fi.  Firefox proved to have the best overall HTML5 video and audio support.  Aside from an issue with WAV audio, however, Opera's implementation would have been exemplary.  Chrome required flash fallback because it only displayed HTML5 video poster images for an instant, as did MSIE8 because it has no native HTML5 video/audio support at all.  Ironically, the only browser whose poor performance mandated the secondary fallback for video was Apple's Safari ... especially so on the iPad ... which is of course the platform that inspired this exercise in the first place.  

Yes, early implementers have found flaws in the iPad, as postings to our Posterous support blog will attest.  But Web 3.0 is what's next ... the iPad is positioned to harness a huge portion of that potential ... and there is no Escaping that.