Why in html5 are the tags switching between video and embed?

Question

Using Chrome on my windows 7 machine, an mpg video using the <video> tag plays as expected. However, on the ipad 1 it does not.

On my pc I used firebug and I could see that the <video> tag has changed to an <embed> tag with other attributes added.

So I changed the original tag to <embed> and the video can now be seen on the ipad (although it is not auto playing).

My question is why is this happening (the conversion from video to embed)?

JD

Answer 1

Firefox simply converts the video tag to the embed tag under the hood because its only syntactic sugar for the browser and so they can reuse the embed parser.

The video tag should work with the iPad.