First and foremost I'd like to thank the great people involved in developing HTML5 and the related standards and technologies both at WHATWG and W3C for making a long-time dream of mine come true by making audio and video content prime citizens on the Web. I believe that the next 10 years will see a new boom created through these technologies that will be bigger than the recent "Web2.0" boom and have a large audio-visual component that again will fundamentally change the way in which people and businesses communicate online.

I'd like to thank particularly the software developers in the diverse browsers that implemented the media elements and their functionality and who have given me feedback on media-related questions whenever I needed it. I'd like to single out Chris Pearce of Mozilla, who has done a huge job in technical proofreading of the complete book and Philip Jägenstedt from Opera for his valuable feedback on Opera-related matters.

I'd like to personally thank the Xiph and the FOMS participants with whom it continues to be an amazing journey to develop open media technology and push the boundaries of the Web for audio and video.

I'd like to thank all those bloggers who have published their extraordinary experiments with the audio and video elements and have inspired many of my examples. I'd like to single out in particular Paul Rouget of Mozilla, whose diverse demos in HTML5 technology really push the boundaries.

I'd like to thank Chris Heilmann for allowing me to reuse his accessible player design for the custom controls demo in the JavaScript chapter.

I'd like to thank the developers of the Audio API both at Mozilla and Google for all the help they provided me to understand the two existing proposals for an Audio API for the media elements.

I'd like to thank the developers at Ericsson Labs for their experiments with the device element and for allowing me to use screenshots of their demos in the device chapter.

I'd like to thank the experts in the media subgroup of the HTML5 Accessibility Task Force for their productive discussions, which have contributed to the media accessibility chapter in this book. I'd like to single out John Foliot and Janina Sajka, whose proofreading of that chapter helped me accurately represent accessibility user needs.

I'd like to thank the colleagues in the W3C Media Fragment URI working group with whom it was a pleasure to develop the specs that will eventually allow direct access to sections of audio and video as described in the accessibility chapter.

I'd like to thank David Bolter and Chris Blizzard of Mozilla, who have on more than one occasion enabled me to be part of meetings and conferences and continue the standards work.

I'd like to thank the team at Apress for keeping the pressure on such that this book was able to be finished within this year.

And finally I'd like to thank all my family for their support, but particularly Mum and Dad for their patience when I had to write a chapter during our holiday in Fiji, Ben for tolerating a somewhat distracted mum, and John for continuing to cheer me on.