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Is HTML5 Ready To Take Over From Flash?
The Flash platform has been taking body blows lately. First Apple, then Scribd, publicly abandon it; now ARM's marketing VP is blaming a delay in ARM smartbooks on the continuing unsuitability of Flash for the subnotebook market. But how ready is HTML5 to take over from Flash? Tim Bray offers a cautionary appraisal of the not-yet-a-standard's state of grace. While Flash may be on the way out (or so legions of its detractors hope), it is still important in many corners of the Web. Here a branding expert demonstrates that the sites of 10 out of 10 leading worldwide brands don't display on the iPad — because they're coded in Flash, of course.
before there are authoring tools for HTML5 which are on par with Adobe's Flash authoring tools.. and not before HTML5 becomes as ubiquitous as the Flash plugin.
played with Google Wave late last year and it's javascript heavy. with a few public waves on the screen i've seen my browser memory usage jump to around 500MB. this is on all browsers. IE8, Chrome and Firefox. so it looks like a choice between RAM hungry HTML5 and CPU heavy Flash
I imagine that those brands don't look at it as "the iPad doesn't have us and needs to support our sites", as much as "we're not reaching iPad users and our sites need to support the iPad".
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
Stupid question that pivots around every Flash-hating entity's mouth wrapped firmly around Steve Jobs' ... marketing skills.
Ding! Ding! Ding!
Show me an even remotely decent HTML5-based game on par with a remotely decent Flash-based game. Oh snap - you can't.. because HTML5 doesn't specify anything with regard to styles or interactivity. So let's allow jscript, CSS and SVG, too. See if you can get the same performance as Flash. Ready. Set. Go.
That's a problem caused by the author, not Flash itself. Perhaps Flash makes it all too easy to break this standard usability model - probably so. Then again, it takes but a few seconds to find solutions: http://www.google.com/search?q=flash+back+button
But even if this is a major stumbling click, where's the hate for all the *box (lightbox, thickbox, etc.) photo viewers, then? I have yet to see even -one- that adjusts the address bar so that I can link to a specific photo. If I'm lucky, I can still right-click the thing to get the image's direct location and point people there. If I'm unlucky, it's "Okay, so go to http://somegallery/, click next page 3 times, then the 2nd row, 3rd image from the left". Mmmm. If the author did their job well, there'll be a link on the image or somewhere within the frame that I can use. But if Flash isn't excused, why is *box?
Hey, as far as VIDEO goes, absolutely.. ditch it.. bring on the HTML5 video tag.
( preferably without any "only h.264" limitations, especially if the host OS is perfectly capable of playing back pretty much every video format under the moon. Let the market decide - and if the market decides that Indeo5 within an AVI container happens to be a much better for a given video than either of h.264 OR Theora, then why restrict that from being played back? )
But until something actually better than Flash comes along for -everything else- (except for ads) that Flash does, Flash isn't about to go away - it will merely be reduced to the market it had -before- video sites boomed.
1. You can't count.
OTOH, it does echo what everyone else is saying on this site, so it's probably pretty insightful.
You couldn't care less.
Go green: turn off your refrigerator.
3- It misused -a lot- for obnoxious ads.
This, in my opinion, is a great reason to keep Flash around.
Yes, it is used an awful lot for an awful lot of obnoxious ads... And I can quickly and easily get rid of those ads just by disabling flash.
How am I going to get rid of the obnoxious ads written in HTML5?
"Work is the curse of the drinking classes." -Oscar Wilde
Apple wants Flash - and any other platform which can be used to create something resembling an application - to go away...
This argument would hold some weight if Apple were not pushing HTML5 applications as a viable and free way to host Web applications and if developers weren't using it. It would hold some weight if Apple was making significant money on application sales compared to how much they make on selling the hardware those apps run on. Neither is true. Your hypothesis holds no water.