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HTML 5 Takes Aim At Flash and Silverlight
snydeq writes "While Adobe, Microsoft, and Sun duke it out with proprietary technologies for implementing multimedia on the Web, HTML 5 has the potential to eat these vendors' lunches, offering Web experiences based on an industry standard. In fact, one expressed goal of the standard is to move the Web away from proprietary technologies such as Flash, Silverlight, and JavaFX. 'It would be a terrible step backward if humanity's major development platform [the Web] was controlled by a single vendor the way that previous platforms such as Windows have been,' says HTML 5 co-editor Ian Hickson, a Google employee. But whether HTML 5 and its Canvas technology will displace proprietary plug-ins 'really depends on what developers do,' says Firefox technical lead Vlad Vukicevic. It also depends on Microsoft, the only company involved in the HTML 5 effort that is both a browser developer and an RIA tool developer. 'That's a big elephant in the room for them because you can imagine the Silverlight team [whose] whole existence is to add [this] functionality in. [But] if Internet Explorer puts it already in there, why do we have Silverlight?' asks Mozilla's Dion Almaer." The RIA guys are quoted as saying they're not worried, because HTML 5 + CSS 3 is 10 years out. Are they just whistling in the dark?
If graphics artist types can't make the kind of pointless crap that they do now with Flash, we won't see uptake of HTML 5.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Just because I can embed video and sound doesn't make my HTML pages the equivalent of flash. More importantly, Microsoft has "announced" intension to support HTML 5, but there's exactly zero movement so far from the market leader, and a long history of similar unfulfilled promises. Until Microsoft says HTML 5 is the next big thing, it isn't. Sorry, I know it sucks.
Celebrate failure, and then learn from it - Nolan Bushnell
Dump Flash and Silverlight into the dust bin of bit history along with the YouTube master control! Onward!
How about adopting Chromes Native Code Binary API plugins for all the browsers while we're at it? Let's get it so that we can auto download plugins written in languages other than that icky JavaScript gooicky stuff.
Get on with it guys! The web browser is still just so much as a dumb terminal spitting screens to a central server master control program!
Let the independent distributed revolution begin!
Flash, Silverlight, and JavaFX all have major vendor tooling support to help coding, developing, deploying on these platforms easy. I don't know of any tools in existence or in development that can beat the solutions offered by these vendors. Adobe might be willing to do that in the past, but they own Macromedia (flash) so I don't know if they will step up. In short, unless the tools are there, it will not see major adoption.
The RIA guys are quoted as saying they're not worried, because HTML 5 + CSS 3 is 10 years out.
If this is the case, how far behind will the browsers be in supporting the standards?
No incumbents, not no where, not no how.
Vote them out every term.
HTML5 is incredibly awesome. I've been building some apps that run only in safari and the things you can do in so very little code make Flash and Silverlight look like anemic. What people don't realize is that HTML5 means tools to author HTML5 in HTML5. I've done a simple Object Oriented Javascript programming interface that currently only runs in Safari4 (only one with sufficient HTML5 support), and it is amazing what you can get done in 500 lines of code. Using the framework at http://www.dloh.org/ I built a graphing app by adding 2 lines of Javascript. A simple movie player is 5 lines of javascript. It takes stupidly little code to make compelling apps using the right tools and HTML5. Furthermore, more and more phones are supporting the WebKit framework. Qualcomm is recruiting a team to port webkit, so we'll soon see it on Brew phones. Iphone runs it. Android phones run it. And even if you run Opera, once again you're getting decent HTML5 support on your phone. This is game changing technology because it runs on the devices that most of the 6 billion people on the planet actually use.
I've recently embarked upon a hobby project where I'm only targeting the latest browsers, excluding IE8.
Not until now have I realized how much we web developers are hampered by IE. Canvas and Javascript are a highly capable platform for interactive graphics, and it works across browsers and operating systems without issue. Chromium on Linux for example, incomplete as it is, works with canvas out of the box (not to mention about 10 times faster than FF in executing Javascript).
The ability to create web pages quickly, using convenient CSS2 and 3 rules, the ability to use piles and piles of Javascript without worry, the ability to have everything just work across my target browsers, it's utterly amazing. If we weren't stuck in this damn backwater due to having to support IE, the web would be a far more compelling platform.
I absolutely cannot wait for the day when HTML5 and CSS3 are widely supported and adopted, but will that day ever come? Surely Microsoft realizes, as I have, how much potential is here, and I don't doubt that some of the higher ups would hold IE back so that developers are forced to use their plugins in order to deliver their content.
For those projects that don't care about IE support, HTML5 canvas/video/audio is a fantastic leap forward for the web. For the rest, business as usual for some time to come I'm afraid.
I'm sorry but I just can't stand developing in Javascript. Javascript is hands down the most arcane language I find myself developing in. At this point being locked into a language like Javascript by the standards community seems much more restrictive than what the proprietary plug-ins are offering. Programming in both Silverlight and Flex has been a liberating experience for me. When using Silverlight or Flex I'm able to focus on creating an application that satisfies my customer's needs; instead of focusing on the black magic tricks that are so often required when using Javascript and HTML. At the end of the day it's so obvious that HTML and Javascript were not intended for serious application development. Not only do Silverlight and Flex offer better programming models they also offer rich support for databinding, and that has simplified so many of my applications. So unless HTML 5 comes packaged with a better programming language and data binding you can count me out.
Had Adobe not steadfastly refused to put any end user controls or setting in Flash no one would have bothered to develop alternatives.
But because they wanted to cater to the jumping monkey segment of the web advertising world, they stonewalled every request for end-user controls, such as no looping, no animation, no sound, etc.
Besides the fact that it is bloatware, its just end user un-friendly.
In order to control Flash, you needed to kill Flash and millions of web browsers would like to do exactly that.
Being an open standard HTML5 is open for development of end-user controls, such as animate only while cursor hovers, sound off till I say so, etc.
Bring on HTML5.
This is a market Adobe deserves to lose.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
this is the beginning of the no-plugins trend and I for one think its about time. Sure some 98% of people have flash installed, silverlight much much less and java (well I tend to steer away from that as much as possible, besides when was the last time anyone ran an applet these days?) but the problem we are seeing is that single vendors take there time to migrate to other platforms, and usually then they lack features and what nots. Look at flash, it isn't even available for the iphone and it's linux support is very limited (alpha still?) not to mention lacking 64bit in windows, fucking windows! If flash was an open platform then more external resources can be used to address these situations but then this is where html5 goes one step further, instead of making it a plugin for everyone to download why not just make it part of the browser and save the hassle.
The fundamental issue with the new RIA standards is the lack the of authoring tools. I have got a number of graphically-inclined friends who are never going to write something with HTML5 mainly because there are no tools out there (yet) which come even close what the Adobe authoring tools can do.
Recently, I sat with one of my friends (who's a decent artist) and played around with Processing 1.0. After several minutes of hard work, it just became abundantly clear that visual thinkers have a lot of trouble expressing what they want algorithmically. The experience was repeated the next time, when he was playing around with chucK (yeah, he's a music dude too).
The graphic artist folks will have a lot of trouble using the HTML 5 authoring tools currently available, especially if they're confined to use HTML Canvas programmatically. I've easily gotten upto speed with canvas, but I'm a programmer with no artistic pretensions.
Real adoption of HTML5 - canvas and video & all, will need easy ways to author media ... not write code.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
RIA stands for Rich Internet Application. It's a term that was coined by Macromedia in order to describe the rich user experiences that can be provided by flash. The term has gained a lot of popularity, and it generally refers to any technology that allows the user to have a rich application experience from within the browser. Currently the major RIA platforms are Flash, Silverlight, and Java FX, and I've also seen this term applied to Ajax before.
The big problem with HTML5/JavaScript/CSS is that each browser has quirky behaviours that need to be tested. Even if Internet Explorer no longer existed, developers would have to test against Firefox, Safari, Chrome and maybe Opera. An example of a quirk is Safari not recognizing table element widths in percentages. A Flash developer tests against one Flash runtime, same with a Silverlight developer and a JavaFX developer.
Adobe released a beta of a multiple browser runtime testing tool, but it's apparently very flawed.
So until the above problems are solved, many RIA developers will simply use Flex, Silverlight or JavaFX, instead of coding for a hodge-podge of different browsers.
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if you make it good, and we like it, you'd be surprised how fast proprietary technology gets replaced. look at PHP. many of you who work corporate may not be aware, but PHP dominates the majority of sites that belong to individuals and small businesses now. check elance, rentacoder, etc - you'll find that the demand for php projects at least quadruples anything closest.
how did it happen ?
people liked it. it was adequate (then), it was free, it allows you to do anything (now). period. it took off.
before any of you language nazis come up and start trolling about how you dont like php syntax, how there are more 'elite' languages out there, and how php is 'not a language' etc, i should say - i dont give a flying fuck. neither do millions of people who utilize it and who develop on it. so keep it.
Read radical news here
Microsoft might be part of the w3 organization, but none of their browsers support any of the HTML5 specs, i dont call that being involved, instead they have specifically decided not to support these standards, and try to slow down, and break apart the web.
> Even if HTML 5 were rigourously defined and backed up by proper compliance testing
For what it's worth, that's one of the most important goals of HTML5.
> how long it will take for browsers to properly support it
That 10 year number in the article is actually more or less the current estimate from people like the spec editor for HTML5.
I'd also prefer SELF in the browser and with Native Client you'll be able to add SELF to your web pages!!!
From the front page of the Native Client site, with my emphasis:
That doesn't bode well for compatibility with ARM subnotebooks, ARM PDAs and PDA phones, PowerPC set-top boxes, etc.
And even on devices with a GenuineIntel or AuthenticAMD CPU, it's far from ready. From the release notes:
Why is it that every time a new technology is created we have to phrase it as "taking aim" or "taking on" or being a "[blank] killer?" Why can't we all just get along?
But seriously, why can't we look at this in terms of the development doors that will be opened, and not mind the fact that RIA content will someday probably fall by the wayside? Progress happens, and those companies/individuals/organizations that fail to adapt fall behind and eventually wither. I think we can all agree that HTML5 has the potential to be awesome, let's approach it in terms of how to make it as awesome as it can be, instead of wringing our hands over the fates of the poor, defenseless multinational corporations.
Porquoi?
One factor I'd think would contribute greatly to the success of one over the others is how well a search provider like Google can reasonably analyze and index the content.
For the past two years, I've been telling everyone the new browser war is between IE and WebKit. WebKit has become the default platform for the mobile browser market (iPhone using Safari and Android and Palm using their version). One of the big reasons Apple started WebKit was to keep the browsing platform out of the hands of a single vendor. It's not that Apple doesn't like proprietary technology. It's that they don't like proprietary technology that they depend upon and don't control.
The battle for HTML 5 vs. Silverlight vs. Flash will be on the mobile platform. It's easy for Silverlight and Adobe to create a desktop application that work with 90% of the desktops (and a bit more work to get another 9%). However, the world is changing. Adobe and Microsoft can't create Silverlight and Flash clients for every single possible mobile platform. The trick is to get enough HTML 5 clients out there that it'll be worth it for developers to learn HTML 5. If enough developers pick up HTML 5, companies will make IDEs for HTML 5.
If that happens, Flash and Silverlight will go away. The other possibility is that Apple will buy Adobe and open source Flash. Apple loves open source standards because it means that they'll be able to sell all the neat gadgets that work with these standards.
As a developer deploying to clients via the web browser using a Native Client application I'd need to have versions that work on these cpus assuming I want you to be able to use the app from your handheld gizmo.
So now, every developer has to buy x86-32, x86-64, ARM, and PowerPC devices in order to test his scripts instead of just downloading different browsers and running them on one PC. I thought we got away from having to buy multiple machines when Safari got ported to Windows.
I wonder what it says about JavaFX that Jonathan Schwartz's blog uses Flash for its video?
http://projectleader.wordpress.com
And yet those tools produce more crap code than Microsoft had market share for its Windows operating system and Internet Explorer browser in the first few years of this decade.
Seriously - there's a huge problem when someone can create a Web page with a WISIWYG editor that breaks when a new browser, browser version or rendering engine comes out and is generally inaccessible to people with disabilities while leaving search engines guessing which content is the most important; yet I can create the exact same page by hand using nothing more than a plain text editor and a decent graphics program (like Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop Elements) that works just as well in Internet Explorer 5, IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Opera, Safari, Chrome and other browsers without having to update them whenever a new browser, browser version or layout engine is released - without hacks about 90% of the time for any browser. And that's just for GUI capable desktop clients.
While using only 25% of the code the WYSIWYG editor barfs up, making the site accessible to everyone (not just the disabled), search engine friendly, and able to support up to three times as many people due to lower code weights, fewer HTTP requests needed with every page view, and optimized images (CSS sprites anyone?) - and that's just off the top of my head.
If I can learn how to do that, anybody can. And my high school counselors (not to mention my family and their friends) thought I would never amount to anything.
I already have iPhone (ARM)
What makes you think Apple is going to digitally sign a Native Client plug-in? From Apple's iPhone SDK developer agreement:
Besides, a lot of students learning web development during high school or college have a dirt-cheap prepaid phone and can't spare $220 plus tax for an iPod Touch.
and X86-32 and X86-64 boxes... they are almost a dime a dozen
To somebody who's already employed. People before their first real job or between jobs need to stretch their computing dollar further, and that might mean using an older PC without x86-64 support.
That is one thing MS Silverlight team doesn't understand too.
If you want designers/video guys embrace a new technology, you have to plug into Adobe's tools and Apple Quicktime framework in a perfect, seamless way.
Both Adobe tools and Apple quicktime has no problems with stuff plugging into them and in case of Quicktime, it is actually designed for "components adding new functionality". There is no "evil" to whine about, just an ignorant company who aims to give hell to people who dares not to use their operating system. Well guess what? Designers really use Adobe, Apple technologies and Quicktime (on windows too) so there is no point sending them to Eclipse IDE download. Yes, they suggest them to use Eclipse... Designers... Eclipse... :)
That huge framework install with all the functionality still hurts quicktime, in case of Windows Media, you have already got it forcibly installed and it also uses undocumented goods of Windows to perform better. Linux? No official support. Real? Well, people still think it is spyware even while it is open source.
All these tools are in fact superior to Flash for embedding video, especially Real Player is really in 11th generation. Why they fail? Because they don't have Adobe design tools for use of real artists (designers) and they are still STUPID (hear me Apple) to add additional stuff to that already bulky download.
I always feel sad for using Flash to embed videos with the functionality missing from it but as I can't tell people to "download 30 mb application" or "give up your IE and use that open source browser" (sorry!), I embed Flash.
That was my point. Quicktime is a great technology being wasted by couple of idiots at Apple Inc. You know, the idiots insisted on asking $$$ for full screen playback for years. They couldn't seperate the "player" and "recorder"... They owned 80% of video market share back in worst days of Apple, can you believe?
Comparing downloads with market share is bogus; for many reasons there have been FAR more Firefox downloads than current daily users. Why don't you tell us the actual market share of Silverlight-enabled browsers?
You lost MLB and NYT after pouring resources into them. I'm less worried about Silverlight than I used to be.
Major League Baseball Advanced Media totally botched the transition not once, but twice. When switching from Flash to Silverlight last year their new Silverlight-based streaming player didn't work, leaving paying customers without service for days. This year they decided to switched back to a Flash-based player ON OPENING DAY. Unfortunately, the new player doesn't work either, and in many ways was worse than the silverlight player, requiring additional installation plugins for HD capabilities, and left these same paying customers without the opening day experience they're paying for two years in a row.
New York Times Reader was a different case. It worked fairly well, but NYT got thoroughly flamed for introducing the reader for windows only, basing it on WPF's FlowDocument capabilities which aren't available for the Mac. Similar text features are eventually going to make it into Silverlight, but things like Printing are a much higher priority for the SL guys. The silverlight version of the reader used a complicated templating system rather than true adaptive text layout. Adobe's Text Layout Framework may not have been the first to market, but that + Flex + AIR are the first to bring it to a wider audience and may ultimately resonate more.
Also I'm sure politics played a prevalent role in both cases, especially in the case of NYT where the Mac User's vitriol for anything microsoft played out.
MLB 2008
http://www.pcworld.com/article/144035/mlbs_web_video_strikes_out_on_opening_day.html
MLB 2009
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-j-elisberg/major-league-baseball-str_b_185158.html
NYT:
http://www.itwriting.com/blog/1424-new-york-times-switches-from-wpfsilverlight-to-flash-for-reader-2.html
Why would you have to worry in the first place?
It's perfectly natural to see projects switch technologies periodically. MLB has bounced between technologies for years and they may again based on their experiences this year.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10215761-93.html
Most of the big companies who have done Silverlight continue to do it, and we're certainly seeing plenty of media companies switching from Flash to Silverlight, and a bunch more once Silverlight 3 is launched with compatibility with F4V (Flash H.264) files.
And from a market share perspective all we need is one great Silverlight site for each user. It's not like someone needs to uninstall Flash to run Silverlight; it's not a zero-sum game.
I'm quite pleased with the current rate of adoption, myself. I'm obviously not going to announce new official numbers here, but there's plenty of sites that track these things that'll give you a sense of the velocity of install rate.
My video compression blog
There have been 400M downloads of Silverlight so far.
That's more than the total market share of Firefox + Safari + Chrome (+ Linux + Mac + iPhone + Android if you're thinking platforms). So Silverlight's already a bigger audience than every browser NOT IE running on Windows.
First, downloads != daily usage. Second, {browser,phone,operating system} != plugin. If you want to use such a wide definition of platform, we might as well include Facebook, since it has an app platform. Facebook has 100M users active daily; Compared to 400M users ever for Silverlight. It seems that Facebook is very likely to be a bigger "platform" than Silverlight.
As for flash, youtube has 100M videos watched per day, and 300M accounts. All of those presumably would have flash, yet that would only be a percentage of the total. It's safe to say flash is in more common usage than Silverlight -- Many people (such as myself) downloaded it for the Olympics and haven't used it since.
In the USA, the highest profile Silverlight projects have probably been Netflix and the Olympics (Beijing and soon Vancouver), with the Masters and NCAA March Madness as recent big ones.
IOW, Silverlight's success up to now stems from exclusive content deals Microsoft has managed to strike with content providers, by way of generous contracts. If Chrome were the only way to see the 2012 Olympics, I would expect a lot of downloads of Chrome, and likely a lawsuit from Microsoft. It's funny how the shoe feels on the other foot.
"Does this situation indicate that the market is no longer receptive to proprietary standards (at least in areas such as the web, where open standards are the norm)?" I definitly think so and a lot of other webdevelopers certainly think so too.
New things are always on the horizon
For several reasons:
1. Microsoft doesn't give a shit about it. Therefore enterprise users won't give a shit.
2. Even if Microsoft does give a shit, neither Apple nor Microsoft will support Ogg Theora. Therefore Linux is SOL again.
3. Apply #1 and 2 to audio standards as well. No common, open, royalty free, pre-installed standard across all platforms == epic fail.
The main power of Flash right now is that once you install the plugin, you might as well forget all that BS about paying for codecs on all three major platforms. It's all in there. It's convenient. It's sufficient.
And even on devices with a GenuineIntel or AuthenticAMD CPU, it's far from ready. From the release notes:
Unfortunately, this is a more fundamental problem. Native Client makes use of x86 CPU's segmentation features to provide memory protection. These are not available on 64-bit CPUs (except when running a program in 32-bit mode). So native client will NEVER work for a fully 64-bit browser. I do not see any way of providing equivalent memory protection without segmentation, short of dynamic instruction rewriting (emulator-style) which has an order of magnitude more overhead (say, 2x overhead, versus 5% overhead for native client).
There have been 400M downloads of Silverlight so far.
Silverlight is included in many updates to Windows XP. At a company I worked for fairly recently, the windows admin ticked the box to install silverlight on some 100+ PCs. No one at that company ever used it while employed there (the company has since gone bust). With Silverlight being included in basic Windows XP upgrades, I'd say it's very likely the vast majority of the 400M "downloads" you cite has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Silverlight adoption or usage.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
By pointless crap, he meant eye-candy that is useless, with fricking animations everywhere that distract you from the actual content and that and only gets in the way of productivity and accessibility. I don't ever remember seeing a Flash website that had an usable interface.
Sure, /if/ your content is the type that can be presented in a text-oriented, page-by-page manner, then creating simple, barebones HTML pages is smart coding.
But every design has its limits. Try pushing at the edges of HTML, and it gets painful, fast. On one project I audited, we were spending 75% of our coding time on browser workarounds. Switching to a RIA was a huge time-saver. At the edges of user interface design, HTML compatibility is thoroughly broken.
However, your instinct that the simplest designs are usually the best is spot-on. This is exactly kind of back-to-the-basics thinking that is behind REST, Atom, JSON, and other web-centric techniques.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
The structure of packages, the strong typing of variables, classes and functions, and many of the classes ARE similar to java
HTML needn't be the end for innovative web software, but it surely could be a long overdue end to those damned plug-ins! The reason those plug-in required software products deserve to die a terrible death is that those programs have hampered commerce and made most customers' web experience, miserable!. If you were running a traditional store, you would not stop customers at the door and insist that they don a monkey suit in order to shop. This is somewhat like what those plug-in software companies did. What macromedia and their ilk were saying was, "Either wear the monkey suit, or take your business somewhere else." recent research has shown that eighty-eight percent of web users refuse to pause to download plug-ins; they simply take their business elsewhere. The fact that most of the world is still using low-bandwidth connections (estimated at eighty percent of users) adds to the problems created by demands for downloading plug-ins before gaining access to commercial sites. With HTML5, business should experience a significant increase in online traffic and sales. If HTML5 lives up to expectations, this one change could be the key factor in some business segments starting on the road to economic recovery. Let's hope the HTML5 implementation happens quickly.