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HTML 5 As a Viable Alternative To Flash?
superglaze writes "Jon von Tetzchner, Opera's CEO, has claimed that the open standards in HTML 5 will make it unnecessary to deliver rich media content using the proprietary Flash. '"You can do most things with web standards today," von Tetzchner said. "In some ways, you may say you don't need Flash." Von Tetzchner added that his comments were not about "killing" Flash. "I like Adobe — they're a nice company," he said. "I think Flash will be around for a very, very long time, but I think it's natural that web standards also evolve to be richer. You can then choose whether you'd like [to deliver rich media content] through web standards or whether you'd like to use Flash."'"
When was the last time I didn't use a table tag on a page? Uh, today... the day before that, and before that.
I use tables rarely and only for displaying data, never for formatting a page. I stopped using tables for design years ago, that's why we have CSS.
I think its time for you to stop using tables for design. Tables lock your user into your content via your specific design. Flexibility and accessibility requires properly formatted CSS with divs and spans, knowing how to use floats and relative positioning.
But yes, datagrid element will be great.
JavaFX may be trailing Flash and Silverlight, but it's the only RIA framework that has a snowball's chance in hell of being open sourced.
It supports charting, animations, and rich media. Version 1.5 is rumoured to have support for complex form controls, just like Flex.
What's more, it's totally integrated into the Java Virtual Machine, meaning it can use all of the Java class libraries. It even has a mobile component, meaning it's possible to port applications between the desktop and supporting mobile platforms.
To me, this single runtime sounds like a much better alternative that the kludge that is HTML/CSS/JavaScript/AJAX support a multitude of IE6/IE7/IE8/Firefox/Safari/Chrome/Opera browser runtimes, especially if there's no framework behind them.
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Except for the music controls, just about everything on that page can be done with current HTML/CSS/JS now.
TABLES have nasty cross-browser issues when combined with CSS, and it's ridiculous to program without CSS for formatting. I recently had to return to my old table-layout ways for an HTML newsletter (HTML mails have to be done the old fashioned way because CSS support in mail programs and webmails is 'less than stellar') and experienced long lost pain and anguish from it.
I used to do real complex layouts with tables, graph paper and a simple text editor (even before Photoshop sliced images for table layouts) and I'm glad I have CSS now. The only exception would be using a table with a single cell for vertical alignment now and then, but that's just a small hack. Everything else can be done simpler with CSS.
As for the main topic, I say: not yet... I'm all for replacing Flash with DHTML and do so every chance I get... but it's still to slow and jerky compared with flash animation for smooth scrolling and fx.
As a Slashdot discussion grows longer, the probability of an analogy involving cars approaches one.
The reason people do this is is to stop you from right clicking on the image and saving it.
Why? You can already disable blink, javascript, images and many more "standard" elements.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
PDF is an ISO standard, SWF is now completely open and much of the related technologies are in the process of being opened, see here. Postscipt has always been fully documented and third party interpreters have been available. I can't find any reference to Adobe threating to sue over Postscript so while it might not be a formal standard it's effectively open (see Ghostscript).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
You obviously haven't tried this...
vertical-align: middle; only works like you think it does along with display: table-cell, but in some browsers it breaks horribly.
For table cells it specifies vertical centering. For inline elements it specifies how to align them relative to the baseline of the containing text. For block elements it does nothing.
http://phrogz.net/CSS/vertical-align/index.html
margin: auto 0 has zero effect because of margin collapsing.
http://www.researchkitchen.de/blog/archives/css-autoheight-and-margincollapsing.php
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