They're resource-hungry. While watching "a video" isn't so much of a pain, it's possible to stumble across blogs (not coincidentally, blogs other than those on my friends list) where most postings are littered with embedded YouTube videos. They also eat bandwidth.
They don't resize well: if they resize at all, you just get the same amount of detail in a different space — and the aspect ratio is obviously locked. With text, if you make the window bigger you get to see more at once and if you read it on your phone you still get all the words.
They're hard to quote from.
It's hard to work with two videos side by side.
Tools like diff choke on video. Therefore, so too does anything built on them, including version control systems and Wiki.
There's no way of providing a link into the middle of one. (Admittedly, a lot of textual web pages lack named anchors, but at least the potential is there.)
There no way of providing a link out of the middle of one. A video of a guy in a suit pointing at a URL on a projection of a Powerpoint presentation is unhelpful.
Fundamentally, a video is a monolithic leaf node in the web, and that's not what the web's about.
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Date: 2008-08-27 12:26 pm (UTC)Other major problems:
- They're resource-hungry. While watching "a video" isn't so much of a pain, it's possible to stumble across blogs (not coincidentally, blogs other than those on my friends list) where most postings are littered with embedded YouTube videos. They also eat bandwidth.
- They don't resize well: if they resize at all, you just get the same amount of detail in a different space — and the aspect ratio is obviously locked. With text, if you make the window bigger you get to see more at once and if you read it on your phone you still get all the words.
- They're hard to quote from.
- It's hard to work with two videos side by side.
- Tools like diff choke on video. Therefore, so too does anything built on them, including version control systems and Wiki.
- There's no way of providing a link into the middle of one. (Admittedly, a lot of textual web pages lack named anchors, but at least the potential is there.)
- There no way of providing a link out of the middle of one. A video of a guy in a suit pointing at a URL on a projection of a Powerpoint presentation is unhelpful.
Fundamentally, a video is a monolithic leaf node in the web, and that's not what the web's about.