I’m going to be posting a series of notes on the production of my first HTML 5 demo page. I’m doing a presentation on it at work (to be shared here, of course) and I want to capture my thoughts as I have them in the process of producing some fully formed HTML5 content.

One of the things I’m looking at with interest is the new Video element. Anything that simplifies embedding video on a web page gets a thumbs up in my book.

Which brings me to this first note. In our weekly developer’s meeting I was outlining some of the things my presentation will contain (as a bit of a preview) and I mentioned video. One of my colleagues, knowing where these things eventually lead asked me- “will it be able to do full screen video?”

After laughing a bit at the perfection of the question (folks both internal and external will ask about full screen video as soon as they catch wind of a new video delivery paradigm,) I realized I simply didn’t know.

Taking a few minutes later on in the day I went to the spec and discovered, thankfully, the answer is no.

“WARNING! User agents should not provide a public API to cause videos to be shown full-screen. A script, combined with a carefully crafted video file, could trick the user into thinking a system-modal dialog had been shown, and prompt the user for a password. There is also the danger of “mere” annoyance, with pages launching full-screen videos when links are clicked or pages navigated. Instead, user-agent specific interface features may be provided to easily allow the user to obtain a full-screen playback mode.”

Aren’t you glad we sorted that out?

More on HTML 5 to come over the next few days.