Standards In Progress: Making Video Posters Accessible, Responsive, and an Element

A couple of years ago, having just finished some work to help de-extinct responsive HTML video, I posted a short list of related improvements that I hoped to see next, each paired with tickets filed against the HTML standard. That list went untouched until last fall when a few Squarespace coworkers joined me to take one of them on as a Hack Week project, which went well enough that the company supported our work to finish the job. That work, standardizing and implementing HTML video lazy-loading, merged into the HTML standard this spring; Chromium browsers quickly picked up support, and browser implementations for Firefox and WebKit (Safari) that my teammates wrote are looking like they'll land any day. You can read about my team's process as well as how to use that new HTML feature over on the Squarespace Engineering Blog. As a standard feature, HTML video lazy-loading can be used on any website now, and for folks who have a website that runs on Squarespace, they can find handy…