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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.
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.
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).
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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"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
Except for the music controls, just about everything on that page can be done with current HTML/CSS/JS now.
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
I work at a web development company, and we are already starting to move away from flash and relying more and more heavily on javascript. The motivation is mostly because:
a) the flash development tools are inferior to javascript ones
b) every web programmer knows at least basic javascript, many don't know any flash. Easier to build on basic js than train someone in flash from scratch
c) the flash development tools cost a fortune, the javascript ones are either free or very afordable
In fact, just yesterday I wrote a javascript replacement for a flash script which we use on many of our websites. (a general purpose loop of photos, with animated transitions). The javascript alternative is smaller, faster to load, *smoother animated in most browsers*, and easier to maintain or improve on in future.
We're also planning to do the same for other flash scripts in our code library.
Even when we do still use flash, it's in smaller ways. We will virtually never build an entire page (let alone website) with flash, instead we'll do the website in html and then embed a tiny piece of flash.
For example, a photo gallery will be pure html/javascript right up until the point where you click the "full screen" button. And even then, the flash doesn't exist in the page until you click that button, it is injected into the page and configured using javascript.
There are still some places where we need flash: video, full screen, and proper file uploads. Video will be the next to drop off the list, pretty soon we'll be doing video in javascript/html, with flash loaded in as a fallback in browsers that can't do video in html.
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.