Apple's Safari gets richer with HTML5 features

According to Mac Rumors yesterday, Safari 3.1 beta is adding some of the new HTML5 features that are in response to the explosion of rich Internet applications and the large number of technologies offering richer functionality. Included in the new build are HTML5 audio and video tags and a SQL storage API. You can grab the new version as a nightly build (at your own risk).

As far as I know Safari is the first major browser to release the new features and as a result we won't see widespread adoption soon (especially considering this is still in beta) but it shows that Apple is very serious about an RIA strategy that increasingly seems browser based. I'm still not entirely clear how the video and audio tags work. In the blog post above about the audio video tags it says that the only currently supported video codes are ones that QuickTime can support. I'm assuming that doesn't include WMV, so if the video tag is used with a WMV file you'd see nothing. I'm not sure how that's a better solution than what Silverlight and Flash support though it is standards based. Will FLV and WMV be supported cross platform? The other major feature, the SQL database is something that browser vendors have been talking about for a while and seems to be something that all browsers will have sooner rather than later in some format or another.