HTML5: Yet Another (yawn) Flash Killer
Every few years (months?) there seems to be a newcomer on the block who incites cries of the next “Flash killer.” First there was Silverlight, then JavaFx, then Unity3D (at least until Flash 11 ; ) — and now it’s HTML 5 which is inspiring people to take pot shots at Flash.
All I have to say is: I DON’T THINK SO.
(And I’m not the only one who agrees.)
Don’t believe me? Check the timetable.
Or if you want a good laugh, the short and sweet version:
Oh, so you’re looking for a better reason? Have fun waiting then! :)
on July 8th, 2009 at 4:18 am
There’s been some deliberate misunderstanding of that timetable, in that part of the project is not to ‘close’ the standard until there is at least one reference implementation - this is different from the previous W3C approach of defining standards that never get implemented.
I’d also say that the corollary of this argument is the one that Flash RIA / web apps will kill desktop apps / make the operating system irrelevant - it’s not true, in that Flash cannot do everything native can, but the majority of apps are simple enough they can be done - and the same will apply with HTML 5 - features will be supported progressively, and it will be possible to do useful things a long time before it comes close to what Flash can do today.
And as we know, if you’re dealing in the mobile space (Android, iPhone, Nokia WebKit) you’re better off using HTML 5 than Flex, seeing as mobile Flash still can’t run it.
on July 8th, 2009 at 4:19 am
You forgot SVG! Remeber how it was supposed to render flash obsolete?
Firefox has SVG support for a few years now and what happened? Nothing.
I don’t want to sound like a fanboy (well, I guess I am one since I work with Flash since 1997 / Flash 2) but a technology present in 98% of the browsers is pretty hard to displace. It would be like asking people to abandon GIFs.
People who read Slashdot all day tend to form their own reality bubble based on a confirmation bias.
on July 8th, 2009 at 10:33 am
It’s so true. I’m so sick of this HTML5 is the second coming rhetoric. I have no doubt HTML5 will be awesome. It’s been a long time coming (and is still a long way from being something we can actually use in commercial work).
As great as HTML5 will be do all these people think that Adobe and MS are just going to say “hey, well HTML5 does everything we do now so let’s just pack it in and stop developing our product”? Seriously, by the time HTML5 is viable Flash/Silverlight and who knows what else will still be innovating and pushing the boundaries of what can be done. They’ll be paving the road for what HTML6 will be 25 years from now.
on July 8th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
I think the following link has the best realistic look on when HTML5 will be ready, not when the spec is done, but when will you be able to support it across all mainstream browsers:
http://a.deveria.com/caniuse/#agents=All&eras=All&cats=All&statuses=All
A lot of the new tags, we might have to wait for IE9 to come out and that’s assuming better support is coming in IE9 and that they won’t ignore certain tags like the video tag.
As Aral Balkan has pointed out in one of his twitter postings: “The problem with HTML is that it requires Microsoft’s blessing in order to evolve.”
Now a company could decide to create a website with HTML5 features for those browsers that support it, but that kind of tier support gets very expensive as you have to have multiple versions of the website for different browsers.
on July 8th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
LOL, SVG, I remember that. Problem is, if memory serves, when SVG threatened Flash back in 1998, it actually was a Flash-killer, or could have been, since Flash 3 at the time was just a quirky animation engine, and SVG had the potential to become a real industry standard. Think of how different our world would be today if MS decided to embed an SVG parser into IE back then?
Thanks for the link Matt. Yes, I assumed that HTML5 would be available reasonably sooner than 2022… I just thought the ishtml5readyyet.com site was pretty damn funny.
Yes, I am a self-admitted fanboy. But I’m also a realist: in some situations hypertext-based technologies make more sense for web apps than Flash. But Flash is still the undisputed king in my books.
Thank ya. Thank ya very much. :)
on July 8th, 2009 at 4:12 pm
“And as we know, if you’re dealing in the mobile space (Android, iPhone, Nokia WebKit) you’re better off using HTML 5 than Flex, seeing as mobile Flash still can’t run it.”
I personally haven’t done any mobile web work, but while this reason is often used, there’s no mention of incompatibilities in the mobile browsers. From what I’ve read there’s still a lot of CSS and JavaScript problems with a lot of mobile browsers. Like apparently Google with all their resources have only in the past couple of months have the web version of all the Google Docs applications working in read mode on the iPhone. They still don’t have all their applications working in write mode as they do in desktop browsers.
However, it seems more of a trend these days not to focus on a mobile version of a website, but instead to use those resources to build a native application on each of the major smartphones.