For those who are blissfully unaware, it is the year 2009 and I still have to click three dropdowns to see many videos on popular sites like Shack News. With the recent news about the HTML5 spec and how it could support a geo-location tag has got me thinking about the information we are willing to give and what other information would be beneficial to open up for sites.

The perfect example of this is known by any avid gamer who enjoys watching the latest trailers of upcoming games. Most, if not all, of the video sites have an age block on "mature" videos and it seems none of them are really willing to go out of their way to improve the experience. Instead users are left with clicking the same old annoying dropdowns for month, day and year so that they can simply watch a video. While some are ok, providing many items to remove the need for scrolling or sorting the year in ascending order so we can cheat, others are limited by their host control and force the user to grab and drag the scrollbar.

Wouldn’t it be nice if our browsers new some basic information about us that could also be tied into our local user account? For instance at work a browser could pull in information about myself from ActiveDirectory like my birthdate, position, et cetera. The browser itself, or the OS could provide a layer of security that disables software from gaining access to certain data I want to keep private.

My point is that within the near (5 years?) future we could possibly see an application for Facebook that allows you to see specifically where your friends are while still having to click the same old dropdowns to view a 30 second game trailer. Thanks W3C for focusing on the important stuff!

P.S. This should be bigger than just HTML5 – it would be helpful to have access to the data from any scripting language. I see a big chance here for Microsoft and ASP.NET 4 to lead the way with an open format, however I am sure that I am unaware of something that would cause such data from being available.