HTML 5 and Safari for the iphone

Mobile
1

I have a client who would very much like to display his new advertisement on his website. I have recommended a flash video player for now, but his concern is that it be able to play on an iphone or an ipad as well.

My question is: does Safari for the iphone and the ipad support the html 5 <video> tag yet? If so does it support the available attributes? If the video tag is not supported, how far in the future should I look for it to be?

2

The video tag won’t reach browser saturation for many years. My preferred method is to encode to baseline h.264 (can be played back by both flash/ios) play it back from a swfobject embedded flash player, with the swfobject div having a html5 video tag playing the same file (if you have flash and javascript the div gets rewritten to use the flash player). Have a look at this to see safari support for video tag