There’s been a good deal of buzz around the internet about a new feature of HTML 5: the video player. The thought is that it will someday replace the God-awful system we have whereby each different site has its own flash video player that works usually, sometimes ok.

My thoughts, for what it’s worth: It’s harder than most people realize to change things after they get that way. Or more articulately: Once people (the internet) get into habits, those habits die hard. For example, people still enter “www”, we still buy bottled water, and the Tonight Show is still terrible. It’ll be rather difficult to convert the internet from Flash to HTML 5, however it will help that there are concrete benefits. Still, it’s hard to get more than 5% of internet users to care when the YouTube system somehow works acceptably.