Sporting a generic design until later this week, the O'Reilly Fluent JavaScript and HTML5 conference (of which I'm a co-chair) has opened for registration and revealed its initial batch of speakers, including Amy Hoy, Brendan Eich, Steve Souders, Wes Bos, and Lea Verou. It takes place in San Francisco between May 29-31.

'Mozilla is about to start supporting the H.264 video codec despite its better judgment,' writes Dave Neal of The Inquirer. A tricky situation of pragmatism versus what's right, alas.

Yet another amazingly produced walkthrough from HTML5 Rocks, this time by Googler Boris Smus. Boris shows off some of HTML5's audio features in the context of gaming, complete with on-page demos. Love it!

Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich laments the state of HTML5 video format support in browsers and notes that, at least on mobile platforms, H.264 support is 'absolutely required' in part due to its unparalled support with hardware decoders and also due to Adobe's pullout of Flash on mobile devices.

Peter Beverloo presents his frequent roundup of what's new and cutting edge in the WebKit project. Amongst other things, WebKit now supports the W3C Battery Status API as well as the W3C Fullscreen API (which is subtly different to Mozilla's).

In Windows 8 Consumer Preview and Server Beta, IE 10 and all other Microsoft WebSocket client and server features now support the final version of the IETF WebSocket Protocol. In addition, IE 10 implements the W3C WebSocket API Candidate Recommendation.

Mozilla's Kevin Dangoor shows off some of the improved developer features coming along in Firefox, including pseudo-class locking in Page Inspector, improvements to the Style Inspector, and editor styling in themes.

Stephen Walther presents a quick introduction to the new W3C CSS3 Grid Layout standard as currently supported by Internet Explorer 10. Reminds me a lot of frame sets! This approach will be a key part of building HTML5 and CSS3 based Metro apps for future MS platforms.

WebDigi has put together both a fun demo and an interesting post about using an iOS device as a controller for a game running in a separate browser (such as on your desktop machine). It worked great for me and it's powered by Socket.IO.

I hadn't heard of Maxthon, a Windows only browser, for years but it turns out its latest incarnation is currently the best scoring browser on HTML5Test.com, a site which scores your browser's HTML5 feature set.

SourceMaps is a new developer-focused feature coming along to several browsers that preserves a mapping between a source language (such as CoffeeScript or Java) and a final, compiled JavaScript source file. Ray Cromwell shows off how it will work in Chrome.

At Google's Developers house at SXSW, Googler Paul Irish gave a talk about the cutting edge of HTML5, including the Page Visibility API and HTML5 webcam support. It's about 30 minutes long and well filmed.

Stephen Woods of Flickr digs into touch interfaces implemented with HTML5 in a 24 minute talk packed with handy info and examples. A highlight is how to implement in-page pinch-to-zoom transformations using CSS matrix transforms.

Bootstrap-WYSIHTML5 is a JavaScript plugin that makes it easy to create simple and attractive WYSIWYG editors based upon the wysihtml5 and Twitter Bootstrap projects.

An interesting CSS-only dropdown menu demo (best viewed in Chrome or Safari), with Ryan Collins explaining the key technique behind it.

An interesting browser-based 'live coding' demo of building a pretty particle system using JavaScript and Canvas. See the code being typed in your browser and watch the effect come together in real time.. sort of.

A Mario Kart style racing game built using HTML5, WebGL and JavaScript. Requires you to log in with Google for some reason but is otherwise a pretty amazing piece of work.