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?

Comments

It's the tools stupid

[QuantumG]

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.

Re:It's the tools stupid

[CountOfJesusChristo]

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.

I was under the impression that canvas tag was going to allow people to create those kinds of whiz-bang interfaces that are currently done in flash.

Re:It's the tools stupid

[nausea_malvarma]

In this day and age, you don't need to know good html in order to make a webpage. We have WYSIWYG editors. So I don't see why we couldn't have an editor for the canvas tag, that would provide artists with a point and click interface like flash does.

Re:It's the tools stupid

[setagllib]

You have to be kidding about Silverlight overtaking Flash. Not only has Silverlight failed to take any notable market share to date, many projects that started with Silverlight have switched to Flash (or even Java and JavaScript).

Even Microsoft Popfly itself is so unpopular you can go for months at a time without hearing about it, and I bet you hadn't heard about it for months until just now.

Re:It's the tools stupid

[Anonymous Coward]

The irony is that the most popular WYSIWYG editors are produced by Adobe and Microsoft.

Re:It's the tools stupid

[ink]

Amen. I wish more developers would take the time to understand this point. Without an analog to Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Flash (vector animator/tweening) -- no other technology will succeed. HTML5 is a great _engine_, but that's all it is until we have the tooling to make it actually useful.

Re:It's the tools stupid

[StreetStealth]

What you're not considering are all the other Flash-based sites that don't trade in pointless crap -- the far more subtle ones where you have to take a peek at the context menu just to be sure they aren't actually using some particularly clever JavaScript.

These are the sites that use but don't abuse Flash, and are the best candidates for HTML 5's more lightweight environment. If the designers and developers of these sites can be convinced it's worth migrating from Flash for the decreased overhead, they just might.

Re:It's the tools stupid

[JobyOne]

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.

As a professional "graphics artist type" I take a offense at that. What if I were to ask about the computer coders types making the kind of buggy crap they do now with [whatever language you like]?

Don't blame me for the ugly crap made by my less talented brethren and I won't blame you for the unstable, insecure crap made by yours. No-talent assclowns are no-talent assclowns, regardless of profession.

This graphics artist type (full disclosure: I may get paid for design, but my hobby is programming so I'm sort of an odd duck), for one, is very excited at the potential of HTML5. I look forward to a world where I can make animations for the web and embed videos and whatnot without having to muck around with stupid Flash/Silverlight/Java/whatever. I HATE Flash, I HATE Silverlight more, I HATE Java the most, and anything I can't name off the top of my head can go STRAIGHT to hell. I do see where the parent is coming from though. I see a lot of designers building sites in Flash just because they lack the analytical skills to wrap their overdeveloped right hemispheres around using CSS and (X)HTML. To design a website that isn't just pretty, but is actually good takes more than a good creative sense.

These days everyone and their brother and their cat might think they're a web designer, but most of them aren't. They're just some guy with a pirated copy of Photoshop. Rest assured that there are web designers out there who know what they're doing.

Re:It's the tools stupid

[Tronster]

Microsoft wins market share, not by innovating, but by making a product, and quickly iterating up-to and past the leader.

Adobe has more baggage to deal with (e.g., http://blogs.adobe.com/rgalvan/2009/06/feature_feedback.html ) which hurts the speed they can push ahead with new features. I've tried Silverlight 1 and 2; both show promise but neither seemed as mature as Flash CS3. Now CS4 is out as-is Silverlight 3. Silverlight 3 compared to 2 offers many times newer features than what Flash CS4 offered over CS3.

For example, I'd love an integrated code editor in Flash with decent editing, syntax highlighting, and intellisense capabilities; I've been waiting for this since MX2004. Silverlight 3 now has a built-in code editor, I wonder how well it stacks up to what Adobe offers.

Overall I'm glad Silverlight exists as it will push Adobe to keep making Flash a better technology, but historically Microsoft has come out on top. It took Microsoft 6 years from IE1.0 to make this happen in the browser marked ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers ) With 3D it took Microsoft until 6 years, from DirectX 1.0 to DirectX 8.1, to overtake OpenGL in the AAA PC gaming market.

Unless there is a shake-up in Microsoft I predict it will happen with this RIA tech too.

Re:It's the tools stupid

[Fallen Seraph]

Independence from Adobe for one. Right now, without Flash, Youtube does not work, period, end of story. That's why they're experimenting with the HTML5 video tag, so that Adobe won't be able to screw them over one day if they feel like it. Granted the likelihood of that happening is slim to none, the potential threat is enough for them to try as hard as possible to push for open standards. This is exemplified by things like the mobile web. While Opera pushes their mobile browser hard, mobile browsers as a whole are limited by Adobe's watered down FlashLite deployments, which makes rich media for mobile browsers nearly impossible using anything but javascript (which is still limited).

Not to mention the fact that it enhances the user experience. If you can just get a browser, with no plugins required, that's much easier for users to deal with.

And on a final note, have most of the people arguing that Flash is "easier for designers to use" actually used Flash? Doing anything really interesting in Flash requires using Actionscript, and Actionscript 2 is basically a javascript clone, while Actionscript 3 is more similar to Java. I learned actionscript 2 before I learned javascript, and the total time to go from one to the other was about 10 minutes (how long it took to learn the new constants, global variables, and proper DOM manipulation).

The fact is, if the web is to continue to grow, it MUST shirk Adobe and Microsoft's proprietary plugins for open standards. Not only do they often run better (Flash can be amazingly bloated, just look at Hulu's standalone Adobe Air app), but they give us more options and possibilities as well.

Re:It's the tools stupid

[RobNich]

I don't see why it would be less profitable. They don't charge for the Flash client, only for the authoring tools.

Even if Silverlight were to take over, as long as Adobe makes a decent tool for creating Silverlight projects, they'll make close to the same amount. Although come to think of it, they may lose some sales only because they don't "own" the technology in consumers' eyes, and many consumers would buy Microsoft if they could anyway.

But since HTML5 is not owned by a company, it puts Adobe on equal footing with any other company making an editor. Consumers would be able to choose their editor, and Adobe has a well-established footing in the market. If they just changed their product to output HTML5 instead of or in addition to a swf file, they'll keep their strangehold on the editor market.

Re:It's the tools stupid

[cheesybagel]

Microsoft has tried to replace the PDF format several times in the past and failed.

Re:It's the tools stupid

[Just Some Guy]

What is Popfly?

A guaranteed out?

Re:It's the tools stupid

[Moridin42]

Not for the Mets...

Re:It's the tools stupid

[Ginger Unicorn]

it's a good job you specified "AD" as I may have been confused by the ambiguity and perhaps thought that internet explorer 6 was first released in the middle of the fucking bronze age

Total nonsense

[WaywardGeek]

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.

Need good tools

[poached]

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.

HTML5, with canvas, is fantastic

[Radhruin]

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.

Re:HTML5, with canvas, is fantastic

[derGoldstein]

I'm actually staring at the screen and trying to think of what to "say". Have you just met Microsoft? They've had .Net code running on BSD since ~2002, and I'm *not* talking about Mono. They've released plenty of code that runs "on the competition", while attacking both from the legal *and* the PR fronts. It's all a messed up game for them, they're stalling for as long as they can. They'll help you along with your science project and then sue you for using their patents in it. If we haven't learned this by now, I suppose we never will.

Yeah, but javascript sucks

[Virus Hunter]

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.

Re:Yeah, but javascript sucks

[acidrainx]

I was ready to jump on you when I read the title of your post, but you're right, mostly. JavaScript is actually a really nice language to develop in (for small projects). With features such as lambdas, closures, and functions as first class objects, you can write some very elegant solutions with very little code.

Even with those features it's still stuck in the dark ages when compared to other modern languages. Prototypal inheritance, while cool, doesn't really offer the power that classical inheritance gives you when you're creating large systems. There's no such thing as super in prototypal inheritance, which gets annoying after a while.

Lately I've been looking into Flex and ActionScript 3. AS3 is basically what EcmaScript 4 was going to be before Microsoft derailed it. It's basically Java with a different syntax, a few extra features (lambdas, closures, namespaces), and no equivalent to abstract. It's really nice.

While I'm all for HTML5 and open standards, I highly doubt that it will ever be able to keep up with proprietary solutions like Flex. There's always going to be that big asshole in the corner who refuses to keep his browser up to date with everyone else. I've written large programs in JavaScript and its just far too stressful trying to keep IE-compliance. Until Microsoft or IE are dead and buried, I'm going to have more fun writing Flex apps that run on all browsers and all platforms without any platform specific code.

well...

[evil_marty]

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.

Developers, developers ... and authoring tools

[Gopal.V]

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.

RIAs have common runtimes, browsers do not

[javacowboy]

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.

Microsoft?

[asdfndsagse]

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.

Re:Adobe brought this on themselves

[derGoldstein]

As an aside: Does anyone remember how they pushed SVG before they bought out Macromedia? They even made a decent player, which you can still get here. Notice the first line on the page: "Please note that Adobe has announced that it will discontinue support for Adobe SVG Viewer on January 1, 2009."... Who needs SVG after you own Flash?

Screw Flash. Screw Acrobat. Screw Silverlight. On the web, the most puritan Free Software advocates are right: If it's proprietary, don't download. Don't install. You've just giving them the power to take away your choices.

I have an ARM, you insensitive clod

[tepples]

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:

Native Client is an open-source research technology for running x86 native code in web applications, with the goal of maintaining the browser neutrality, OS portability, and safety that people expect from web apps.

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:

Support for the following browsers is not available at this time:

• Internet Explorer

[...]
Native Client does not work on 64-bit versions of Windows.

Re:We independent developers decide that ...

[shutdown -p now]

It could be done with PHP because replacing server software doesn't affects clients; in particular, it does not require them to install new plugins and/or change their browser.

Client-side, it's a very different kettle of fish. Silverlight can fight Flash by being bundled with the OS (or installed wia WU); JavaFX can fight it by being bundled with JRE (or installed when JRE is auto-updated). I don't see any similar opportunity for HTML5.

Isn't search a factor?

[caywen]

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.

WebKit vs. IE

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Sun uses Flash

[jasonmanley]

I wonder what it says about JavaFX that Jonathan Schwartz's blog uses Flash for its video?

You're right - the tools are stupid.

[Dan Schulz]

In this day and age, you don't need to know good html in order to make a webpage. We have WYSIWYG editors. So I don't see why we couldn't have an editor for the canvas tag, that would provide artists with a point and click interface like flash does.

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.

Flash is de-facto standard for a reason

[Ilgaz]

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?

Re:400M Silverlight installs

[Dragonshed]

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