HTML5 Video. It just sounds sexy. Even typing it stirs an excitement inside me usually reserved for theme park rides and new episodes of Family Guy. It’s one of the most lauded features within the new HTML spec, and also one of the most divisive.

Perhaps not divisive in the web community, most designers and developers seem to love the idea of it, but certainly divisive in the real world of cross browser support, licensing and (dare we even mention it) Adobe Flash.

I’ve been doing a bit of experimenting with the Canvas and Video tags in HTML5 lately, and found some cool features hiding in plain sight. One of those is the Canvas.drawImage() api call. Here is the description on the draft site.

One effort shared by both browsers and developers is making the web browsing experience faster. There are many common-known ways to keep your websites fast: using CSS sprites and image optimization, using .htaccess to set file headers for longer caching, javascript file compression, using CDNs, and so on. I’ve even detailed some of the website optimization efforts used on this website. Firefox introduces a new strategy for website optimization: link prefetching.