Google Translate has rolled a out several new features, including the ability to hear your translated English text spoken by a computerized voice.

For maximum cross-browser compatibility, Google Translate embeds text-to-speech mp3s using Flash. However, web developer Weston Ruter has already figured out how to grab the audio files for use on any webpage and uses the HTML5 audio tag to embed them in his demo.

The new Translate audio tools generate (rough) pronunciations of whatever text is entered the end of this URL:

http://translate.google.com/translate_tts?tl=en&q=text

Just pass along the phrase you’d like to hear instead of “text” at the end of the URL and you’ll get an mp3 file like this one. You may have to try a couple of different browsers to get a translated file that works flawlessly, (Not surprisingly, it works especially well in Chrome). With a tool like this, the urge to get silly is irresistible, as Twitter user Brad Cohen has done by feeding Google Translate some Justin Timberlake lyrics.

Take one of these mp3s and embed it using HTML5’s audio tag — as Ruter has done on his site — and you’ve got an instant, mobile translation service that’ll work on the iPhone, Android and other Webkit-based mobile browsers.

The iPhone handles Ruter’s example quite well, though the interface is slightly awkward — Mobile Safari brings up a new overlay page to play the audio. Still, despite a few quirks, having a text-to-speech generator available on the web offers developers quite a few browser-based possibilities for a task previously relegated to desktop apps, or, otherwise, full-fledged mobile apps like the translation tools available for the iPhone and Android devices.

The biggest catch at the moment is that Google Translate’s text-to-speech feature is only available in English. But as with most Google services, the initial limitations are likely to disappear before too long.

Also part of the announcement, Google Translate now performs translations as you type — no need for the “translate” button — and there’s also a new “Show romanization” to read the text written phonetically in English. This works with all non-Roman languages except for Hebrew, Arabic and Persian.

See Also:

• Google Translate: Bringing “Engrish” To Your Search Results
• Google Reader’s New Translate Feature Helps Overcome Language Barriers
• W3C Drops Audio and Video Codec Requirements From HTML 5
• HTML 5 Support by Browser: Opera Continues to Lead the Pack

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While the language itself is almost fully baked, HTML5 won’t fully arrive for at least another two years, according to one of the men charged with its design.

“I don’t expect to see full implementation of HTML5 across all the major browsers until the end of 2011 at least,” says Philippe Le Hegaret, interaction domain leader for the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), who oversees the development of HTML5.

He tells Webmonkey the specification outlining the long-promised rewrite of the web’s underlying language will be ready towards the end of 2010, but because of varying levels of support across different browsers, especially in the areas of video and animation, we’re in for a longer wait.

Most web pages are currently written in HTML version HTML 4.01, which has been around since the late 1990s. The web was mostly made up of static pages when HTML was born, and it has grown by leaps and bounds since then. Now, we favor complex web applications written in JavaScript like Gmail and Facebook, we stream videos in high-definition, we consume news in real-time feeds and generally push our browsers as far as they’ll go. These developments have left HTML drastically outdated, and web authors have resorted to using a variety of hacks and plug-ins to make everything work properly.

HTML5 — which is actually a combination of languages, APIs and other technologies to make scripted applications more powerful — promises to solve many of the problems of its predecessor, and do so without the hacks and plug-ins.

We’re already close. All the major browsers are providing some level of support for HTML5.

“There’s strong support already in Firefox and Safari. Even Microsoft IE8 has some partial support,” says Le Hegaret, referring to some code within HTML5 that enables the browser to pass information between pages.

Browser makers are approaching support incrementally, adding features little by little with every subsequent release. Some, like Mozilla, can build new features into the next release in a matter of months. For others, like Microsoft, it takes much longer.

Google Chrome is maturing extremely quickly and already supports most of HTML5. This is mostly because Google didn’t start from scratch — the company chose to use the open source Webkit rendering engine, the same one used by Safari. Still, this doesn’t mean both browsers support HTML5 equally.

“Video support between Safari and Chrome, despite the fact that they are both using the same underlying engine, is totally different because video support is not part of the Webkit project at the moment,” says Le Hegaret.

It’s actually this very issue — support for playing videos inside the browser — that continues to be one of main factors blocking the broad adoption of HTML5.

The way the specification is written now, website authors will have the ability to link to a video file as simply as an image file. The video plays in the browser without using a plug-in, and the author can create a player wrapper with controls.

But browser vendors are stuck arguing over which video format to support. Mozilla, Google and Opera are interested in the open source Ogg Theora video format. Apple has substantial investments in its Quicktime technology, so it’s pushing for the Quicktime-backed H.264 format. Microsoft wants people to use its Silverlight plug-in, so Internet Explorer isn’t supporting native video playback in the browser at all.

Google has voiced support for Ogg, but it has also recently made a bid to purchase On2, a company that makes a competing video technology. Rumor has it Google might release On2’s video technology under an open source license once the sale is complete.

Until these issues are sorted out, consumers and content providers alike are forced to rely on plug-ins. Le Hegaret says that while these plug-ins have certainly helped the web arrive where it is today, they continue to be a burden on the user.

Setting up any browser to support both H.264 and Ogg Theora requires at least one plug in, which harms the user experience.

“It’s hard today to ask people to install a plug-in unless the payoff is huge,” he says. “What’s driving the most successful plug-in, which is Flash, is video support. If you can’t see YouTube, your life on the web is pretty miserable. You’re missing a lot.”

Plug-ins aren’t just harder on web users, but they’re hard on web developers, too.

“Building with Flash or Silverlight in a way that lets you share information between the content appearing inside the plug-in and the rest of the page presents some challenges,” says Le Hegaret.

Unlike its predecessor, HTML5 has been designed with web applications in mind. The current HTML5 specification includes a media API that makes it easier to connect animations or video and audio elements — things traditionally presented within a Flash player — with the rest of the content on the page.

“You get a smoother application if you use HTML5. You’re not crossing a software layer. It’s all part of the same application.”

Unfortunately, the YouTubes of the world aren’t going to make a baseline switch from Flash to HTML5 unless they know there’s strong support for it in the browsers.

But they are testing the waters: Wikipedia is experimenting with HTML5 video support by serving Ogg Theora video to browsers that can handle it, and Flash to everyone else. YouTube and the video site Dailymotion have also set up special demo pages using this technique.

Le Hegaret says we’ll be in this period of transition — a dual-experience web where content sites serve HTML5 video along with a Flash fall-back — for a while.

“Web developers will continue to have to understand that not everyone is using the latest generation web browser, and that’s OK in the short term.”

As far as being able to make the switch to a pure HTML5 web altogether, Le Hegaret says that’s only possible once browser vendors sort out their differences.

Once that day arrives, the final switch to HTML5 will be in the hands of the content providers. It’s up to them to begin coding for HTML5 standards and ditching support for old browsers.

“There are still a significant amount of people out there using IE6,” says Le Hegaret. “As a developer right now, you can’t really ignore it. Hopefully, in two or three years, you will be able to start ignoring IE6.”

See Also:

• Tim Berners-Lee Sees Promise, Challenges in HTML5
• W3C Drops Audio and Video Codec Requirements From HTML 5
• Adobe Fights Off HTML5 Threat With New Flash Player 10.1
• Mozilla Pushes the Web Forward With Firefox 3.5

The great promise of HTML5 is that it will turn the web into a full-fledged computing platform awash with video, animation and real-time interactions, yet free of the hacks and plug-ins common today.

While the language itself is almost fully baked, HTML5 won’t fully arrive for at least another two years, according to one of the men charged with its design.

“I don’t expect to see full implementation of HTML5 across all the major browsers until the end of 2011 at least,” says Philippe Le Hegaret, interaction domain leader for the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C), who oversees the development of HTML5.

He tells Webmonkey the specification outlining the long-promised rewrite of the web’s underlying language will be ready towards the end of 2010, but because of varying levels of support across different browsers, especially in the areas of video and animation, we’re in for a longer wait.

Most web pages are currently written in HTML version HTML 4.01, which has been around since the late 1990s. The web was mostly made up of static pages when HTML was born, and it has grown by leaps and bounds since then. Now, we favor complex web applications written in JavaScript like Gmail and Facebook, we stream videos in high-definition, we consume news in real-time feeds and generally push our browsers as far as they’ll go. These developments have left HTML drastically outdated, and web authors have resorted to using a variety of hacks and plug-ins to make everything work properly.

HTML5 — which is actually a combination of languages, APIs and other technologies to make scripted applications more powerful — promises to solve many of the problems of its predecessor, and do so without the hacks and plug-ins.

We’re already close. All the major browsers are providing some level of support for HTML5.

“There’s strong support already in Firefox and Safari. Even Microsoft IE8 has some partial support,” says Le Hegaret, referring to some code within HTML5 that enables the browser to pass information between pages.

Browser makers are approaching support incrementally, adding features little by little with every subsequent release. Some, like Mozilla, can build new features into the next release in a matter of months. For others, like Microsoft, it takes much longer.

Google Chrome is maturing extremely quickly and already supports most of HTML5. This is mostly because Google didn’t start from scratch — the company chose to use the open source Webkit rendering engine, the same one used by Safari. Still, this doesn’t mean both browsers support HTML5 equally.

“Video support between Safari and Chrome, despite the fact that they are both using the same underlying engine, is totally different because video support is not part of the Webkit project at the moment,” says Le Hegaret.

It’s actually this very issue — support for playing videos inside the browser — that continues to be one of main factors blocking the broad adoption of HTML5.

The way the specification is written now, website authors will have the ability to link to a video file as simply as an image file. The video plays in the browser without using a plug-in, and the author can create a player wrapper with controls.

But browser vendors are stuck arguing over which video format to support. Mozilla, Google and Opera are interested in the open source Ogg Theora video format. Apple has substantial investments in its Quicktime technology, so it’s pushing for the Quicktime-backed H.264 format. Microsoft wants people to use its Silverlight plug-in, so Internet Explorer isn’t supporting native video playback in the browser at all.

Google has voiced support for Ogg, but it has also recently made a bid to purchase On2, a company that makes a competing video technology. Rumor has it Google might release On2’s video technology under an open source license once the sale is complete.

Until these issues are sorted out, consumers and content providers alike are forced to rely on plug-ins. Le Hegaret says that while these plug-ins have certainly helped the web arrive where it is today, they continue to be a burden on the user.

Setting up any browser to support both H.264 and Ogg Theora requires at least one plug in, which harms the user experience.

“It’s hard today to ask people to install a plug-in unless the payoff is huge,” he says. “What’s driving the most successful plug-in, which is Flash, is video support. If you can’t see YouTube, your life on the web is pretty miserable. You’re missing a lot.”

Plug-ins aren’t just harder on web users, but they’re hard on web developers, too.

“Building with Flash or Silverlight in a way that lets you share information between the content appearing inside the plug-in and the rest of the page presents some challenges,” says Le Hegaret.

Unlike its predecessor, HTML5 has been designed with web applications in mind. The current HTML5 specification includes a media API that makes it easier to connect animations or video and audio elements — things traditionally presented within a Flash player — with the rest of the content on the page.

“You get a smoother application if you use HTML5. You’re not crossing a software layer. It’s all part of the same application.”

Unfortunately, the YouTubes of the world aren’t going to make a baseline switch from Flash to HTML5 unless they know there’s strong support for it in the browsers.

But they are testing the waters: Wikipedia is experimenting with HTML5 video support by serving Ogg Theora video to browsers that can handle it, and Flash to everyone else. YouTube and the video site Dailymotion have also set up special demo pages using this technique.

Le Hegaret says we’ll be in this period of transition — a dual-experience web where content sites serve HTML5 video along with a Flash fall-back — for a while.

“Web developers will continue to have to understand that not everyone is using the latest generation web browser, and that’s OK in the short term.”

As far as being able to make the switch to a pure HTML5 web altogether, Le Hegaret says that’s only possible once browser vendors sort out their differences.

Once that day arrives, the final switch to HTML5 will be in the hands of the content providers. It’s up to them to begin coding for HTML5 standards and ditching support for old browsers.

“There are still a significant amount of people out there using IE6,” says Le Hegaret. “As a developer right now, you can’t really ignore it. Hopefully, in two or three years, you will be able to start ignoring IE6.”

See Also:

• Tim Berners-Lee Sees Promise, Challenges in HTML5
• W3C Drops Audio and Video Codec Requirements From HTML 5
• Adobe Fights Off HTML5 Threat With New Flash Player 10.1
• Mozilla Pushes the Web Forward With Firefox 3.5

Go to Source

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British physicist who first designed the way web servers deliver pages to web browsers nearly 19 years ago, sees great promise in HTML5, the much-anticipated rewrite of the language used to build web pages.

“I think (HTML5) is great,” he said at the Worldwide Web Consortium’s (W3C) annual member gathering, taking place here this week.

HTML5 is a mixture of several different technologies that allow content creators to do more with web pages. It defines rules for presenting video, audio, mathematical equations, complex layouts, 2-D animations and non-standard typefaces. Each bit of technology has its own working group within the W3C chartered with developing that one component.

“We’ve had the pieces for a while,” he says. “Seeing all these things finally coming together is exciting, and it multiplies the power of each one,” Berners-Lee says.

HTML5 also enhances the way browsers can store and process data, which has led to the creation of more complex and rich web applications that run in the browser like Gmail, Facebook and apps that allow real-time data sharing, like Google Wave.

“Yes, this is a markup language for web pages,” he says, “but the really big shift that’s happening here — and, you could argue, what’s actually driving the fancy features — is the shift to the web becoming a client-side computing platform.”

The HTML5 specification is close to completion. The most recent releases of browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera all support most of the technologies being rolled in to HTML5. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer supports fewer of HTML5’s advancements, but it’s catching up. HTML5 is expected to become an official recommendation by late 2010 or 2011.

Now that the web has been elevated to a more powerful computing platform by HTML5, Berners-Lee says it has also given rise to complicated security issues.

“You got a piece of code from site A, and you’re person B running a browser you got from company C, and that code wants to access data stored with company E for the purposes of printing it on a printer owned by company D — How do you build that so that it’s not susceptible to all kinds of nasty attacks?”

“The technology is very exciting, but there’s actually a lot of work to do in these corridors to make it work on the real web in a secure way.”

See Also:

• W3C Drops Audio and Video Codec Requirements From HTML 5
• Google Throws Its Weight Behind HTML 5
• Google Waves Goodbye to E-Mail, Welcomes Real-Time Communication

Go to Source

Early in the development of HTML5, the spec’s authors toyed with the idea of including a mandate requiring all browsers to support the open source Ogg Theora video codec. The goal was to create a single, open source video solution that would work in every browser.

Currently video on the web is generally embedded using proprietary technologies like Adobe’s Flash Player or Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin. Native HTML5 video would give users a way to watch movies online without the need of third-party plugins.

Unfortunately, while the HTML5 spec provides a way to embed video without using plugins, it stops short of specifying a video codec — which means codec support will vary from browser to browser, making it difficult to embed a single video that will work everywhere.

While the Ogg Theora recommendation has been dropped from HTML5, some browser vendors, like Mozilla, still intend to support the Ogg Theora codecs. In fact, Firefox 3.5 already offers full support for embedding .ogg videos using the HTML5 video tag.

However, one thing Firefox 3.5 lacks is the ability to play those videos in fullscreen mode. Given the increasing visual quality of online video, the missing fullscreen support is a conspicuous point against open video — especially when other video solutions, like Flash, have long supported fullscreen video.

Luckily the when Firefox 3.6 arrives at the end of 2009 Mozilla seems poised to include fullscreen support, putting open source video on largely equal footing with proprietary technologies like Flash or Silverlight.

As the Mozilla Links blog points out, for those that don’t want to wait for Firefox 3.6 to enjoy fullscreen video, there is a plugin available now which offers fullscreen support for native HTML5 video. However, the plugin has a few shortcomings — like the need to restart the video when you enter fullscreen mode.

While we’re happy to see Mozilla continue its support for native HTML5 video via Ogg Theora, keep in mind that Google is in the process of acquiring On2 Technologies, makers of a number of video codecs.

HTML 5 fans are hoping that, if the acquisition is approved, Google will turn around and make the newly acquired codecs open source — a move that could end the circular and unresolved debate over which video codec should be part of the HTML5 specification. In other words, even of Firefox is the only browser to fully embrace Ogg, there may still be hope for an open video codec requirement in HTML5.

See Also:

• How Firefox Is Pushing Open Video Onto the Web
• Google’s Latest Acquisition Renews Hope for Open Video in HTML 5
• W3C Drops Audio and Video Codec Requirements From HTML 5

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