Responsive video

We have seen that, as ever, supporting older browsers leads to code bloat. What began with the <video> tag being one or two lines ended up being 10 or more lines (and an extra Flash file) just to make older versions of Internet Explorer happy! For my own part, I'm usually happy to forego the Flash fallback in pursuit of a smaller code footprint but each usage case differs.

Now, the only problem with our lovely HTML5 video implementation is it's not responsive. That's right. All that hard work and our responsive web design doesn't err… respond. Take a look at the following screenshot and do your best to fight back the tears:

Thankfully, for HTML5 embedded video, the fix is easy. Simply remove any height and width attributes in the markup (for example, remove width="640" height="480") and add the following in the CSS:

video { max-width: 100%; height: auto; }

However, whilst that works fine for files that we might be hosting locally, it doesn't solve the problem of videos...