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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."'"
Kill flash. Kill it stone cold dead.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
How long until HTML 5 is supported in every browser?
The "good" thing about Flash is that it is a plug in. Flash can be added to just about every browser by downloading a plug in.
HTML 5 will take a lot longer to get into every browser.
I really don't like Flash or plug-ins but in this case it is an advantage and will be for a long time to come.
Oh and NOBODY except Slashdot will write to a standard that IE doesn't support.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Datagrid or not, if your site requires flash for anything other than playing sound or video files, then it is more than likely I will not spend much time there.
"Now, I know a lot of people are going to argue with me, but the most important tag in HTML is . Every single graphical trick done to either speed up or sexify your web site is done with tables inside tables inside tables--it's tables all the way down!...When's the last time you laid out a site without a table element on every page?" Whoa, I haven't done than since IE4 / Netscape 4.7 days. I use tables for tabular data, very rarely for layout. I'm quite positive I'm not alone in this. While there are a number of Javascript-based datagrid controls available, it would be good to have some sort of standardized control as part of the standard definition.
In current days, Flash is only used to:
- Casual games;
- Boring add banners, like "hit the monkey";
- Video players;
- Webpages menus, when the designer has no know-how to use CSS/Javascript.
Excluding games, all uses can be replaced by web-standards (even videos, in next-generation browsers).
"In some ways, you may say you don't need Flash."
I can't tell you how many times I've come across a site which uses Flash to show a single, individual picture. Not a stream of pictures. Not a mosaic of pictures. Not a slideshow of pictures. One picture.
WTF? You're telling me it's easier to code a Flash object to display that one picture than it is to throw in a link to the picture? Seriously?
Then you have those sites which insist on having their front page as Flash-only. Brilliant. Just brilliant. How the hell am I supposed to find anything on your site if there is no way to save that link for future reference?
Flash is ugly, slow and just plain annoying. Almost as annoying as punch the monkey. Web designers who rely on Flash to do their work should have their knuckles pounded with a five pound cast-iron doorstop dropped from a height of ten feet then made to punch a punching bag.
Hopefully HTML 5 will cure the web of this illness.
We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security. -- Dwight D. Eisenhower
CSS has some nasty cross-browser problems that tables do not, making them far easier than CSS for many things, assuming you can do them in CSS at all.
Don't twist history. The reason flash took over web video is because vistors tired of WMV/QT codec hell.
TODO: Something witty here...
It's unlikely Internet Explorer will die any time soon. So unless the Microsoft developers somehow magically start putting together a browser that is current in support of web standards, Flash and its brethren will never die. It doesn't matter how great the HTML5 support is in Gecko (Firefox) and Webkit (Chrome, Safari) - as long as IE continues to lag, we're stuck ("we" meaning those of us who code pages for the real world).
#DeleteChrome
Through a screen reader, maybe? In which case your table layout will completely fail, because screen readers expect the contents of TABLE tags to be, you know, tabular data.
You need to understand that blind and vision-impaired people will be among those "viewing" your page, and design accordingly.
Read my blog.
Flash is Flash. Period. If your Flash file works in IE, it works in FF, Opera, Safari, etc. It requires a plugin sure, but it's one that's almost universally adopted.
By comparison just about everything else is developed in 2 phases:
1. Write standards-compliant code that's well-formatted and works properly.
2. Fix about 37,000 IE-only bugs, knowing that ~70% of your users are going to be viewing your site with that piece of crap. Additional time is required because IE6 and 7 aren't even consistent with each other in terms of how they piss on the standards. This is especially true with CSS, which IE is absolutely terrible with.
I welcome HTML 5, as I think it has a lot of nice improvements, as well as a lot of stuff that should've been there years ago. We just have to pray that browser support - especially from MS - actually allows us to USE the new features on a regular basis.
Also, one side note: Even assuming Flash is no longer used AT ALL for layouts or content delivery (and I hope it isn't), Flash movies and games will of course continue to exist... so Flash isn't going to die as some are saying, it'll simply be used for what it was actually designed for - creating animations and games.
Datagrid or not, if your site requires flash for anything other than playing sound or video files, then it is more than likely I will not spend much time there
Absolutely. And it is not just for being unavailable to disabled people, slow, insecure, buggy, destroyer of the control a user has about the navigation (top-of-the-head example: if a menu is implemented in flash, how do you choose whether to open a menu entry in a new tab or new window?), bandwidth-wasting, proprietary, restricted and not class-platform; it is also about the content.
There is a very strong negative correlation between the usefulness of a site and the amount of bling in it.
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook : no Flash; javascript unnecessary
http://www.c-faq.com/ : no Flash; no javascript
http://news.google.com/ : no Flash ; javascript not necessary
http://news.bbc.co.uk/ : Fash restricted to the videos ; javascript unnecessary
Now compare this to a typical teenager-oriented website: even menus are Flash. They choose Flash both
for things that make 0 sense being flash (like menus) and for things that may be easier with Flash, but are almost always a big waste of time. They think a website needs to animate every other element.
The one positive aspect in Flash is that it its use warns you against the quality of the content before you waste your time loading and reading it.