As HTML5 Gets 2014 Final Date, Flash Floods Mobile

CWmike writes "Those curious about the final release date for the hotly debated HTML5 need wonder no more: the W3C plans to finalize the standard by July 2014, the consortium said on Monday. 'This is the first time we've been able to answer people's questions of when it will be done,' said W3C's Ian Jacobs. 'More and more people from more and more industries are asking when it will be done. They require stability in the standard and very high levels of interoperability.' Meanwhile, as Apple dismisses the value of the Flash Player in favor of HTML5 for its smartphones and tablets, Adobe said on Monday that it predicts 600% growth in the number of smartphones having the Flash 10.1 Player installed in 2011, reaching 132 million smartphones and more than 50 tablet models with either the player installed or available for download. For the six months following the launch of Flash 10.1, more than 20 million smartphones were shipped or upgraded with it."

Comments

Shame about flash

[Chrisq]

Shame about flash - whereas I don't like Apple's draconian banning of the whole technology it leads to a lot of real, heavyweight web pages, and really preentation should be dealt with via the browser and not a plugin (via HTML5)

Re:Shame about flash

[commodore6502]

>>>preentation should be dealt with via the browser and not a plugin (via HTML5)

Plugins have existed since the earliest days of browsers (like quicktime plugin to view embedded movies)(or wav plugin to deal with sounds). Why do you think that is an inferior method?

Personally I'd rather have the lightweight browser and then add features (like video) only as I need them.

Re:Shame about flash

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have the Flash (or any other) plugin installed, and I can assure you that Flash is not necessary to create heavyweight, dysfunctional web pages. Extensive use of JavaScript/AJAX creates some of the worst clusterfucks already. Just look at the new /. design.

Re:Shame about flash

[Americano]

Even better, how about a lightweight browser that doesn't require plugins to view videos?

Re:Shame about flash

[jo_ham]

It's not so much "banning" as "your implementation is piss poor, even on Windows, try again later". If Adobe actually grave a crap about flash performance they would work on it and they have made some inroads with 10.1 - it's a world better on OS X, for example, compared to Flash 10.0, but it's still nowhere near good enough for a mobile device that doesn't have a ton of extra CPU to throw at it to make performance acceptable. If there was actually a properly decent flash player for mobiles that could run on iOS then Apple may reconsider - as it does often when it is apparent that it made a choice that didn't work out (3rd party multitasking, cut and paste), but I think even then they have already committed to HTML5 and see no reason to change.

If the XBMC guys (and by extension the people who write code in the projects they use) can make a better flash player than Adobe can, something is wrong with the picture. Not that open source coders contributing code as a hobby would be any less skilled than Adobe, per se, just that it's one of Adobe's core products and you think they'd throw a ton of resources at it to make it better, and it *can* be better than it is - a lot better. It just isn't.

Re:Shame about flash

[commodore6502]

A browser with built-in support for the thousands of different codecs AND lightweight (less than 100 MB)? Impossible.

Re:Shame about flash

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably because then you would need to upgrade your browser all the time to add codecs? Whereas with plugins you don't have to update the whole browser. Think of how it is right now with google chrome and flash. Every time flash does a security update you get a whole new chrome browser (which is damn stupid if you think about it).

Re:Shame about flash

[TheCycoONE]

A browser that relies on the OS for support for thousands of different codecs AND lightweight (less than 100 MB)? Easy.
Even if not though - VLC for Windows is only a 20MB download.

Re:Shame about flash

[commodore6502]

>>>JavaScript/AJAX creates some of the worst clusterfucks already. Just look at the new /. design.

As I discovered with my Dialup connection. I imagine a sub-1000k Cellphone connection would be just as bad. Scripts supposedly speed things up, but I find plain-text pages (i.e. slashdot classic) load much much faster than the new script-based monstrosity. Probably because dialup uses compression, and text pages get squeezed to 5% their original size (images also get compressed - about 20% original size).

Re:Shame about flash

[peragrin]

How about a plugin that requires direct hardware access in order to function?

forget an OS, or browser needing hardware access a friggin plugin requires it.

That is flash. it is also why it is not very portable. it is also why the arm versions don't implement the full flash feature set even though adobe says it does. There are many flash websites that simply don't work with 10.1 mobile flash.

Re:Shame about flash

[commodore6502]

I was talking about the size *when running*. For example I have Firefox open right now and it's using 500Meg, versus Non-google Chromium which hovers around 40Meg (but also does not have built-in video support - it launches external apps or plugins).

>>>relies on the OS for support for thousands of different codecs

That's just great (not). My Windows XP doesn't have the newer codecs built in. Neither does Ubuntu or Puppy Linux. Or Commodore Amiga OS.

Re:Shame about flash

[petermgreen]

The root problem is commerical software vendors sell their software on new features.

That is fine for a field with little exposure to security threats but for basic infrastructure it leads to features that seemed like a good idea at the time but cause big problems down the road. For example putting scripting in pdf opened up massive cans of worms. Besides the plain and simple exploits it opened the possibility for fraud through the authoring of PDFs that displayed different content on different systems.

Re:Shame about flash

[bemymonkey]

For example I have Firefox open right now and it's using 500Meg, versus Non-google Chromium which hovers around 40Meg (but also does not have built-in video support - it launches external apps or plugins).

I find it hard to believe that Chromium is so much more RAM-efficient than Chrome - because the latter uses about 20-40MB per tab on my machines...

Re:Shame about flash

[cgenman]

Yes. This move truly shows the advantage of technologies from the future over tech that has been live and working for about ten years now.

Flash is bulky. And it should never be used for cases where base HTML would do. But it revolutionized both casual games and independent animation. And, unlike HTML 5, it actually exists.

Re:Shame about flash

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because pages using tons of HTML 5 features are the pinnacle of lightweight web pages... oh wait. If you are looking for a lightweight web then it's not HTML 5 you want.

Re:Shame about flash

[Anonymous Coward]

I had to update a module for a remote start the other day in the field. My phone was only getting Edge on the local tower, and it was the slowest version of Edge I've ever seen. I had my phone wifi tethered to my laptop, and because of the Ajax and flash.. and the Edge connection only running at 1.3K/sec the front page took about 5 minutes to load. Then, worse yet, the "plug-in" to flash their modules is written in ActiveX, so I have to use IE instead of the browser of my choice. Needless to say, with the flash animation on the home page plus the Ajax use for the drop down menus for the year/make/model selection, it took about 25 minutes to flash the module that would normally have taken less than 1
(www.idatalink.com is the website if you care to visit. While their products are top notch and the troubleshooting/support/guides are years beyond the competition, their site is in no way setup for someone to really do the installs in the field and update the modules unless you hav 3G and a good signal at that. I had to do it in the field because the 07 F250 I was working on shouldn't have a chip-in-the-key, but it was setup like a 08 that DOES have the chip-in-the-key).

Re:Shame about flash

[cgenman]

To be fair, the old /. design was an even bigger Javascript / AJAX mess. At least they bugfixed this one before launching it.

Re:Shame about flash

[Americano]

Ah, I see, so the browser couldn't use some scheme whereby it would support whatever video codecs are supported natively by your OS, allowing you to simply update a playback library when/if a codec changes, or install a new library to support a new codec?

What is it with people having some sort of fetish for putting EVERYTHING into the frigging browser?

Re:Shame about flash

[bberens]

While I agree with that in principle I have a LOT more problems with Flash (probably poor job of the browser handling it) than I do with any native HTML/javascript. I've never had an HTML heavy site hang or crash.

Re:Shame about flash

[PortHaven]

You do realize that the earliest HTML formats did not support a lot of features.

How about this alternative, making Adobe's Flash part of the HTML spec. Hmm...no more plugin. But then, we'd have the problem where every browser rendered things differently.

Re:Shame about flash

[PortHaven]

Also remember, Apple doesn't play nice and doesn't let Adobe have access to all the resources for Flash to utilize in order to perform nicely.

Re:Shame about flash

[AndyAndyAndyAndy]

Well that is the hope in HTML5... one of its most pivotal features is the Video tag. Although there's no guarantee that browser makers will want to scale things down resource-wise after HTML5 becomes ubiquitous (especially the IE/Safari bunch, for obvious reasons).

Re:Shame about flash

[PortHaven]

Well, I've had tons of AJAX coded sites fail to work. From Netflix to Slashdot to Facebook (the worse).

I find it extremely common for it not to just work right.

Re:Shame about flash

[gig]

> Plugins have existed since the earliest days of browsers (like quicktime plugin to
> view embedded movies)(or wav plugin to deal with sounds). Why do you think
> that is an inferior method?

Because the Web is hardware and platform independent, and plugins are not. Because there is a way now to give the browser the audio or video via HTML and the browser renders it, cutting out the middleman. Because today's Web user is a consumer who doesn't know what a plugin is and doesn't want to manually update it or install a collection of them or be told they don't have the right one. Because there is an almost 10 year old ISO/IEC video standard that is available in the hardware of every PC and mobile, so that they can play the same video that FlashPlayer and QuickTime player play but without having to have the software players. Because hardware playback takes much less battery power and less expensive hardware than software playback. Because little plugin makers like Adobe become tin pot dictators and they to play gatekeeper with Web content that should be universally accessible. Because plugins are an accessibility nightmare compared to HTML. Because plugins are a security nightmare compared to HTML. Because plugins limit hardware innovation, for example, the "smartbook" ARM notebook was rejected by PC makers because it did not have a FlashPlayer, furthering Intel's hegemony. driving up hardware prices and reducing battery life.

That is just off the top of my head. I'm sure I missed some.

> Personally I'd rather have the lightweight browser and then add features (like video)
> only as I need them.

Video is a feature of your operating system and hardware. Your lightweight browser just passes the HTML video to the OS. HTML5 just standardizes how to do this. It's more lightweight than plugins.

Re:Shame about flash

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you must be lucky. Slashdot crashes almost any browsers I've tried at least on a daily basis if not more often.

Re:Shame about flash

[rjstanford]

What is it with people having some sort of fetish for putting EVERYTHING into the frigging browser?

This is what happens when people try to replace emacs.

Re:Shame about flash

[TheRaven64]

You have to update your browser all the time to fix security holes. Because it's so complex that it contains lots of bugs, which are potentially exploitable. Because it has to implement loads of features. Like video decoding...

Re:Shame about flash

[jo_ham]

That is total rubbish. The core of OS X, including the graphics and windowing subsystems are *extensively* documented and supported, with examples and explanations. The resources are there, and there's no evidence of Apple "restricting access" to resources. You have all the tools that Apple does, and the overview is listed here:
http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/MacOSX/Conceptual/OSX_Technology_Overview/GraphicsTechnologies/GraphicsTechnologies.html

Perhaps Adobe should start there?

It's clearly not all (if at all) Apple's fault, since the flash players that other people have built for OS X (there's one in XBMC that I use for BBC iPlayer streams, and there was one in On2's video compression app before it went away) that are much better than the actual flash plugin.

There's clearly a problem when the exact same flash stream for iPlayer takes 30-40% CPU in XBMC and 70-100% in Adobe's plugin, or are you suggesting that Apple is "playing nice and giving the OSS developers access" that they are not giving to Adobe? How exactly would they do that?

Flash is a performance nightmare, and not just on OS X (although it is particularly bad on OS X) and it's not Apple's fault, as much as Adobe try to tell you otherwise. It's a pretty hefty performance hog on Windows too - is that also Apple's fault? Correlation != Causation, but in this case, the performance sucks on two different operating systems *and* alternative flash players are better. Mmmmmm, clearly not any fault of Adobe's, oh no!

Re:Shame about flash

[TheRaven64]

Oh, please stop repeating this crap. Apple didn't let Adobe have access to the low-level decoder interface on the hardware. Instead, they gave them access to a heavily-optimised H.264 CODEC which had the ability to output to an OpenGL surface. Everything that flash needs to do was possible with existing OS X APIs. With OS X 10.6.4, Apple added the exact APIs that Adobe requested. The result? Flash still uses twice as much CPU power as other apps.

Adobe's complaint came from the fact that they wanted to target an OS that ships with an H.264 decoder and an efficient compositing system, and replace it with their own H.264 decoder, their own (badly written) compositing system, and still expect it to be fast.

Re:Shame about flash

[geekoid]

You mean that HTML 5 code I write doesn't exist?

Don't confuse not a final version of a standard with doesn't exist. What standard is flash compliant to?

The horse was replaced well before cars had standards.

Re:Shame about flash

[TrancePhreak]

The problem here is Apple blocked access to that stuff from the browser. It doesn't matter what the OS allows if the browser is going to block it.

Re:Shame about flash

[painandgreed]

It's not so much "banning" as "your implementation is piss poor, even on Windows, try again later".

No, it's banned. It's banned just like Java. The base reason that Flash is not on the iPhone is because they do not allow non-Apple apps the run their own code on the iPhone, probably for security reasons. That Flash is a resource hog, the cause of most Apple browser crashes, and probably wouldn't provide a good experience because most apps aren't built for a touchscreen interface, is just additional reasons to be happy it's not on the iPhone.

Like Java, either Apple can allow apps to run their own code, or Apple could make it's own Flash and Java apps for the iPhone. Neither is really coming anytime soon if ever.

Re:Shame about flash

[CheerfulMacFanboy]

Also remember, Apple doesn't play nice and doesn't let Adobe have access to all the resources for Flash to utilize in order to perform nicely.

So why the hell are Flash Apps so much slower on Flash 10.x than on 9.x? Does Apple block access to the CPU? The lame "we don't get access to video acceleration" doesn't cut it for me when everything is slow.

Re:Shame about flash

[westlake]

Even better, how about a lightweight browser that doesn't require plugins to view videos?

Developments that affect the web and the browser move along many tracks.

The Flash based game can be as elegant as "Machinarium" and it can be here today and not something we have to wait for until 2014.

Media codecs in particular are a moving target.

HEVC, aka H.265, should be ready in about two to three years. HEVC is not exclusively or evenprimarilyy a web or smartphone codec - it has a lot to offer to a streaming media service like Netflix or an HDTV manufacturer like Mitsubishi,Samsung or Panasonic.

Which means that if the HEVC "app" becomes a marketable bullet point in theatrical production and home video sales, then licensing the codec across the board makes perfect sense, because the incremental cost is effectively zero.

It makes even more sense if you own a significant share of the technology.

Re:Shame about flash

[jo_ham]

Also nonsense. Do they also block Firefox and Chrome and browsers they do not control? Flash performance is equally is bad in all browsers.

Also, how do they "block access from the browser"? The Safari main process handles input from the keyboard and mouse, but other than that the plugin has access to the same core features of OS X. Safari doesn't "block" anything. Flash performance actually got better when they put it in a separate process of its own.

Re:Shame about flash

[m50d]

Because the Web is hardware and platform independent, and plugins are not.

At some point something has to use the native system. Demanding an OS provide the capability to play videos seems far more reasonable than demanding a browser do so - it's a common requirement, not something specific to web browsing.

Because today's Web user is a consumer who doesn't know what a plugin is and doesn't want to manually update it or install a collection of them or be told they don't have the right one.

So ship with sensible defaults - but don't remove the possibility of doing advanced things just because they might confuse some users.

Because there is an almost 10 year old ISO/IEC video standard that is available in the hardware of every PC and mobile, so that they can play the same video that FlashPlayer and QuickTime player play but without having to have the software players.

It's available in the hardware and OS of every PC and mobile. But it's not available in every browser. So why were you arguing that the browser should do the playback again?

Because hardware playback takes much less battery power and less expensive hardware than software playback.

And you think having the /browser/ do the playback will make it /easier/ to use hardware capabilities? Ahahahahahaha. Ha.

Because little plugin makers like Adobe become tin pot dictators and they to play gatekeeper with Web content that should be universally accessible.

That's nothing to what you see from browser makers once html gets complex enough that only multimillion-dollar organizations can make browsers. Which is what will happen if browsers have to implement every single bit of functionality themselves. What's next, different operating systems render their text differently so clearly web browsers should include their own font rendering engines?

Because plugins are an accessibility nightmare compared to HTML.

How? Idiots using flash for static text content are an accessibility nightmare, but for straight-up video, putting it in a video tag rather than an embed tag isn't going to make any difference.

Because plugins are a security nightmare compared to HTML.

With html5 the opposite is true. At this stage we've got a pretty good idea of what is and isn't safe to trust from random websites - think flashblock. But we're used to thinking of HTML as simple documents, that can't possibly harm our computers however maliciously they were crafted. When html5 becomes big, prepare for a whole new swarm of attack vectors.

Because plugins limit hardware innovation, for example, the "smartbook" ARM notebook was rejected by PC makers

If it's impossible to write a video player on ARM, then in plugin-world at least you could write some kind of web browser, and see a degraded version of the internet. Wheras in your world, if you can't write an ARM video player then you can't write a web browser at all. So you're worse off with html than with plugins.

Now, I suspect the issue was not that it's impossible to write a video player for ARM, but rather than Flash licensing prevented it being used. But that's a separate problem; we're talking about plugin vs built-in, and with plugins that themselves follow open standards that simply isn't a problem. Rather, a plugin landscape encourages innovation by letting new hardware/browser makers implement a "bare minimum" html and add features gradually. And from the other side, new proposed features for the web can be introduced as plugins to start with (see SVG), allowing us to use them on sites and try them out before demanding that they be added to every web browser.

Re:Shame about flash

[bonch]

People still worry about RAM? Unused memory is wasted memory. I also dispute the claim that Chromium is only using 40MB of memory on your system.

That's just great (not). My Windows XP doesn't have the newer codecs built in.

So install them. Your original argument was that you preferred having a "lightweight browser" in which you installed plug-ins to augment functionality. How is that different from installing system-wide codecs and allowing the browser to use them?

Re:Shame about flash

[bonch]

Also remember, Apple doesn't play nice and doesn't let Adobe have access to all the resources for Flash to utilize in order to perform nicely.

This is a total fabrication.

Re:Shame about flash

[Americano]

And that probably explains why I stick with vim for text editing, and have never understood the appeal of emacs - I don't want my text editor to also do a million other things, I'm happy with pretty simple text-editing.

Re:Shame about flash

[BitZtream]

That's just great (not). My Windows XP doesn't have the newer codecs built in.

So install them, thats why theres a codec system, and thats why you can install just about any codec you want in Windows, including installing any modern codec on an XP machine.

Neither does Ubuntu or Puppy Linux. Or Commodore Amiga OS.

So your arguing that you shouldn't move on to the modern intelligent way of doing things because you use several OSes that are out of date or unable to focus long enough to keep up with what users want?

If you expect Linux to have any weight in the world its going to have to be popular and being popular is going to require it doing things like providing system wide support for things. Unfortunately, no one can agree long enough to standardize and provide a single interface to work with, so it ends up fragmented and not worth being supported by anyone who values their time.

No one is going to sit around and wait on Linux to come up with a solution to a problem the other two more popular desktop OSes solved at least 15 years ago.

Re:Shame about flash

[BitZtream]

No they don't, I've written plugins with hardware acceleration for safari, works perfectly. Its well documented.

Re:Shame about flash

[Anonymous Coward]

So why haven't browsers caught up on Javascript / HTML5 performance? They've had years to improve, but no. The only company that seems to have done so is Google's V8 engine which was released TWO YEARS ago.

On my machines, heavy HTML5 pages bog down my desktop machine as much as Flash 10.1. There was an HTML5 sidescroller mentioned on /. a while back, and it rang up 40-50% CPU power (and didn't work properly on my phone -- die once and the game continued to scroll but wouldn't reset). I hopped onto NewGrounds and found a random top-down shooter. 50-60%. Add in the fact that:

Flash: starfield, two layers of background terrain. HTML5: star field, and a ground terrain (that the player couldn't move over)
Flash: 20-30 sprites (ships, bullets). HTML5: Line based bullets, 10-15 sprites.
Flash: had ads, webpage full of content like comments, etc. HTML5: just the game, as it was a demo; no other content on the page

So IMHO, Flash wins in terms of performance for now. Let's not forget that certain OSs like the one you mention did not expose the functionality that was necessary for Flash acceleration, and was the primary reason for it being CPU intensive (and as such, felt more unstable)

Mobile devices have practically less then half of available processing power, so of course CPU intensive sites (Flash or HTML5) are going to bog down the device a little bit.

I'm also not sure what you mean by "XBMC" making a flash player. Googled it, and came up with no relevant hits. Link?

Re:Shame about flash

[icebraining]

Linux can't do anything about it. It's not a technical problem, it's a legal one.

Re:Shame about flash

[jo_ham]

The BBC iPlayer plugin uses the open source libraries that can decode flash video streams and pass them to XBMC (libRTMP), so while not a fully featured flash player, it does exactly what that flash player does when running in a browser, except at a quarter the CPU power. Even with all the added fluff of flash (animation, all the scripting etc), just playing a video stream should be a simple, low resource task.

The XBMC plugin is here http://code.google.com/p/xbmc-iplayerv2/ - I can watch HD streams using this without frame dropping that results in watching the same streams with Flash (in any of the three browsers I have on this machine), either in fullscreen [slightly better for flash] or windowed [clearly a massive performance hit due to scaling]. There should be no difference, or little difference, but it is *huge*.

The "not exposing the necessary stuff for flash acceleration" is a red herring. There was no h.264 acceleration *at all* on OS X (even for Apple's own software) until the 10.6.3 update added it for certain NVidia GPUs only (and in later releases, most of the modern GPUs shipping in Macs). The comparisons made between different flash versions (across Windows and OS X) also had no hardware acceleration on the Windows side either, and yet showed much better performance.

As far as other hardware acceleration goes, all software on OS X has access to Quartz, and by extension Quartz Extreme (the hardware acceleration portion) - this is transparent to applications and handled by the Quartz framework if your GPU supports it (pretty much any GPU with 64Mb of memory and up) - there was no "denying access" to this stuff.

Safari has been working on their JS engine (or rather, the WebKit team has been, which features a lot of input from Apple, although Nitro is separate from WebKit [as you say, Chrome uses WebKit and VP8), the same team works on it. Safari 5, released in 2010 had a 30% speed up over v4 with the Nitro engine - it hasn't been standing still.

Re:Shame about flash

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Because plugins are an accessibility nightmare compared to HTML.

How? Idiots using flash for static text content are an accessibility nightmare, but for straight-up video, putting it in a video tag rather than an embed tag isn't going to make any difference.

Let me tackle this. What if you're deaf, but want to have an audio track close captioned for you? Does the Flash player support it? Nope, you're screwed. Does the HTML5 implementation of your browser support it? Find another implementation, like one specifically for the deaf, because it is an open standard third parties can build these solutions.

What if you're blind and want to listen to video but don't want to waste CPU cycles decoding the video stream? See the above.

What if you have very poor vision and need to be able to quickly and easily zoom the video all the way in, possibly with a separate non-zoomed version on another monitor? See above.

What if you're paralyzed and have a palsy and using the controls of Adobe Flash Player are too hard with the little joystick in your mouth with a single click button you use to control the cursor? With HTML, yup you guessed it, anyone can make an implementation and multiple people are doing so, including ones for specialized users.

Contrary to your assertion, using an open standard with video codecs streamed makes an enormous difference for accessibility to the handicapped and for that matter for accessibility to anyone else using a device Adobe doesn't care about, Like Linux desktops or voice controlled systems.

Re:Shame about flash

[exomondo]

Even better, how about a lightweight browser that doesn't require plugins to view videos?

How about magic?

Re:Shame about flash

[exomondo]

This is what happens when people try to replace emacs.

But i *need* tetris in my text-editor.

Re:Shame about flash

[icebraining]

There are free compression services for any connection, but I'd prefer if webdevelopers/admins would enable compression on the server.

For example, Slashdot has a 216KB Javascript file which isn't gzipped, which seems stupid since static files like those can be precompressed and then the server would provide the version supported by the browser.

Re:Shame about flash

[m50d]

You're conflating two things. The problems with flash are caused by flash being proprietary, not flash being a plugin; if MS built flash into IE, we'd still have all the same problems. If you display open standard videos using (say) the embed tag, then it would actually be easier for a disabled person to use - because it would just use their system player, which would presumably be already set up for their own preferences, rather than having to configure the browser's player that's completely separated from the player they watch DVDs etc. on.

Re:Shame about flash

[exomondo]

Flash is a performance nightmare

No, it's just as easy to have poor performing HTML5. Conversely look at Mark Ecko's website, or AgencyNet or Dave Werner...these are well-written Flash sites that have minimal CPU usage and run smooth even on my old N900.
Of course an open standard is better, but that's the HTML5 argument, not performance.

Re:Shame about flash

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

You're conflating two things. The problems with flash are caused by flash being proprietary, not flash being a plugin...

Sort of, except if a technology is widespread and not proprietary it is rarely a plug-in because you suffer performance penalties. Conversely, if a technology is a plug-in it is rarely popular unless there are no open alternatives because bundled open solutions can be built in and thus gain a wider user base.

if MS built flash into IE, we'd still have all the same problems.

Not necessarily because IE's implementation might provide some of the features we need and suddenly there would be competition between IE's implementation and Adobe's for which is best, driving innovation and improvements, including accessibility.

If you display open standard videos using (say) the embed tag, then it would actually be easier for a disabled person to use - because it would just use their system player, which would presumably be already set up for their own preferences, rather than having to configure the browser's player that's completely separated from the player they watch DVDs etc. on.

Whether they configure their browser or a different external player or their OS-wide preferences is fairly immaterial, wouldn't you say? Rarely does the DVD player have the same configuration as a player for internet video, so perhaps the ideal would be to hand all video to the OS and let the OS handle it with a single configuration other apps can tap into.

Re:Shame about flash

[jo_ham]

That is remarkable. I just spent a little time browsing around Ecko's site, trying to push it to high CPU, jumping between sections, playing the videos.

On Safari 5 on OS X I was barely breaking 39% CPU (2Ghz Core 2 Duo) which is a dramatic difference to the considerably higher loads of other sites (80% while sitting idle on the Diablo 3 page, for example, or 90% CPU while streaming HD content from BBC iPlayer). This is the first flash site I have seen that is actually not a huge resource hog. Why aren't more like that? :/

Re:Shame about flash

[melikamp]

What is it with people having some sort of fetish for putting EVERYTHING into the frigging browser?

This problem starts, believe it or not, with certain Web designers. Some people out there will not be able to sleep at night if you and me actually control the way their pages are displayed or their Web-sites used. The Flash obsession, for example, starts with the desire to prevent you from saving videos, and it continues with an absolute necessity of making you watch ads. Me and you understand that it would be elementary to have a browser plugin that detects Web-links to video files/streams and starts an external player. The truth is, clicking on a link to a video is so easy, no one needs a plugin for that. A program like VLC is far superior to any browser gizmo with respect to controlling the video playback. On a phone form-factor, playing back inside the browser window is simply INSANE. Indeed, linking is the simplest solution, and the one with the least overhead, and also the one that was working as far back as there were video players and Web browsers, and, of course, the one still implemented on every frigging Web-site not done by dicks.

I am afraid that HTML5 is not going to change the landscape. People who have a monopoly on serving bits (or just desire it) will persist in using proprietary software and secret protocols. HTML5 will be worse than useless to them for the reason stated above. IMHO, Mozilla and W3C are mostly wasting everyone's time with the video tag. Other tags, such as the ones for Web-forms, seem far more useful. And all of this superfluous BS distracts people from converting over to XHTML, which would actually improve Web documents' quality and compatibility.

Re:Shame about flash

[cgenman]

Considering HTML 5 compatible browser penetration is hovering around 20%, then yes, to the great majority of people who might be visiting your website the HTML 5 code you write doesn't exist.

There were mountains of arguments that went with losing the 5% of people who were stuck on I.E. 5. Suddenly cutting out 80% of your audience is an instant no-go for any professional web developer.

Re:Shame about flash

[exomondo]

Why aren't more like that? :/

Probably because every man and his dog with a quad-core CPU and 8GB RAM can point-and-click together a POS flash website that 'runs fine'. I see the same thing happening with HTML5 too once more content authoring tools are available.

Re:Shame about flash

[exomondo]

The result? Flash still uses twice as much CPU power as other apps.

As other apps? Yes Flash will likely use more CPU that OSX's calculator, it *needs* more CPU power because it's *doing* more.

Re:Shame about flash

[Anonymous Coward]

No problem.

Re:Shame about flash

[TheRaven64]

Yet another nice strawman. Playing back full-screen H.264, Flash uses twice as much CPU as QuickTime Player, which uses the same low-level APIs. It even manages to use a lot more than CPU than VLC, which does the decoding with no hardware assistance at all. Oh, and don't give me the crap that the flash developers spout about needing compositing support to add overlays - both QuickTime Player and VLC provide transparent overlays for the controls, yet they do it using GPU acceleration and Flash does it entirely on the CPU, so Flash CPU usage spikes when you start showing an overlay.

Re:Shame about flash

[tehcyder]

People still worry about RAM? Unused memory is wasted memory.

What, so you should always be running as many programs as possible at any one time just to ensure that as near 100% of memory is being used as possible?

Browsers that eat up memory are actually doing you a favour?

Re:Shame about flash

[tepples]

So install them

So I can install codecs into Windows Media or GStreamer. But where will users get them? VLC and ffdshow are illegal, you know, and I don't want to require all visitors to my web site to have to spend $15 on a copy of CoreAVC.

Neither does Ubuntu

So your arguing that you shouldn't move on to the modern intelligent way of doing things because you use several OSes that are out of date

Update Manager keeps Ubuntu 10.10 up to date, yet it still doesn't make patented codecs legal to distribute under a free software license in the United States.

or unable to focus long enough to keep up with what users want?

If Canonical doesn't have the legal right to distribute a codec, "focus" doesn't enter into the equation. The U.S. patent license for AVC is incompatible with widely used free software licenses.

Re:Shame about flash

[exomondo]

Lol...relax, you didn't just see that as a jab at a lack of specificity?

Re:Shame about flash

[m50d]

except if a technology is widespread and not proprietary it is rarely a plug-in because you suffer performance penalties

Hardly - in most implementations plugins run as native-code libraries. Witness e.g. winamp, where every single decoder is a plugin - not just the esoteric ones like TTA, but even MP3. And it's quite possibly the best-performing GUI music player out there.

Not necessarily because IE's implementation might provide some of the features we need and suddenly there would be competition between IE's implementation and Adobe's for which is best

Right, but the useful thing there is the competition. Which could happen equally well if there were two competing plugins.

perhaps the ideal would be to hand all video to the OS and let the OS handle it with a single configuration other apps can tap into.

Yeah - which is exactly what video for windows does (which is how IE will play embedded video), and e.g. gstreamer is trying to offer the same thing on linux (I've no idea what mac is doing). These are the appropriate ways for web browsers to play video, not implementing their own separate decoder engine.

3 MORE Years?

[Crudely_Indecent]

At least it's got a version number. I'd much rather wait than have a numberless living HTML zombie to support.

Re:3 MORE Years?

[MikeDirnt69]

Just wait for the after-HTML5. They willl drop version numbers.

Re:3 MORE Years?

[grub]

I hope they pick up an Ubuntu-like naming scheme after HTML5.

Nothing says Professional like "HTML Fistable Foal" or whatever.

Re:3 MORE Years?

[Crudely_Indecent]

That was WHATWG who proposed dropping version numbers.

Per Ian Jacobs the W3C HTMLWG has no plans to follow the WHATWG versionless path.

You can read about it here.
http://www.webmonkey.com/2011/02/html5-will-be-done-in-2014-what-comes-next/

Re:3 MORE Years?

[CynicTheHedgehog]

Hate to break it to you, but we have a numberless HTML zombie right now. Are Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Apple waiting patiently for the specification to be complete? No, HTML 5 is here today. Officially it's HTML 4 + stuff in HTML 5 that's already been agreed on. The vendors know where they want to go with the markup and with the exception of Microsoft, they all produce several releases a year. All of the engines have undergone complete revisions in the last few years to better position themselves for extensibility. Adding new markup is the easy part. The hard part is stuff not covered by the HTML spec: codecs, platform integration, hardware support, etc. I can't wait for the rolling spec. It will mean more functionality sooner.

Re:3 MORE Years?

[dougisfunny]

As compared to some Windows codenames: Whistler, Chicago, Memphis, Janus, Mantis, Diamond, Lonestar, Bobcat, Longhorn, Q, Cougar, Blackcomb.

Re:3 MORE Years?

[Crudely_Indecent]

HTML 4 + stuff in HTML 5 that's already been agreed on.

The problem is that it's not a finalized standard and as we've seen in the tag, there is anything but a consensus about what it should support. If each vendor goes their own way, then we'll be back to the IE6 glory days where sites either had conditionals for IE or they didn't support any other browser.

Maybe you're comfortable supporting a non-standard, but I'm not. I'm currently aiming for xhtml 1.0 strict compliance and if it doesn't validate, it doesn't get published. The reason is simple. I want the page to be compatible with all modern browsers, not just the browser du jour. The problem with a rolling spec is that you're aiming at a moving target.

The only way to manage that situation is to choose the lowest common denominator of features that the majority of browsers support...and probably a bit lower than that so you don't exclude too many.

I've had this argument before, and it's pointless...HTML will become like the meaningless term "Web 2.0"... With no standard, it will become a buzzword open to interpretation and won't actually mean anything. Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Apple are going to fuck this up thoroughly in hope that a clear winner of the new browser war emerges.

The battle ground is the web and casualties will be our websites.

Re:3 MORE Years?

[AndyAndyAndyAndy]

I've had this argument before, and it's pointless...HTML will become like the meaningless term "Web 2.0"... With no standard, it will become a buzzword open to interpretation and won't actually mean anything. Google, Microsoft, Mozilla and Apple are going to fuck this up thoroughly in hope that a clear winner of the new browser war emerges.

The battle ground is the web and casualties will be our websites.

It isn't like any vendor is going to retract rendering support for an older version of (X)HTML. If this "browser war" fud-analogy is correct, it would mean certain failure for the first browser to stop supporting HTML in any of its old forms.

So yeah, moving forward with a non-standard may not be best, like, on paper, but bickering and fighting over new markup/codecs/resource allocation moving forward won't take away from the power us web developers have in using a slightly older but universally-supported version just for the sake of sidestepping the mess.

All of the websites up now, and undoubtedly all of them under construction today and well into the future... they will be fine. The only sites at-risk will be those super-early-adopters and those which were made without a basic understanding of which standard they are writing in.

Re:3 MORE Years?

[perryizgr8]

i've started seeing chrome do the same thing ie used to do. a glaring example is the new mail desktop notifications in gmail. it works only in gmail and only on chrome(ium). this is not a part of any standard whatsoever. google is just exploiting its influence (gmail and chrome) to create de facto standards. if this trend continues, we'll see ie6 all over again.
ie6 did the same thing, it created lots and lots of great new features that were not part of any standard. and it was a better browser than the competition at that time. chrome will be the new ie6.

Re:3 MORE Years?

[CynicTheHedgehog]

HTML has never been the problem. It's trivial to make a page that is HTML compliant. The problem has always been (and will always be) CSS, DOM, and scripting, which are not covered by HTML and have already been defined and standardized well beyond the capabilities of current browsers. And as long as there are patents and royalties involved , things like embedded video will never be settled on, largely due to the intractability of the open source community on such topics.

Besides, it's not like there won't be a standard. It will just have a minor version, or will include modules of functionality. So your page may require a browser that supports HTML 5.1, or HTML 5 plus HTML canvasing 1.1 or some such. It's already being done with XML (XML, XML schema definitions, XSL, XPath, XSL:FO, etc. are all separate standards) with huge success.

... and Statistics

[rjstanford]

... with either the player installed or available for download.

Gee, I wish that I could announce my application usage statistics using that metric and get press coverage.

streaming live media

[Idimmu Xul]

Do the video tags adequately support live streaming media yet? I've read, and probably experienced unknowingly, that the video tags do a good job of streaming normal media, but some of the stuff I've been reading suggests that live streaming for sporting events and such is fubar?

Re:streaming live media

[peragrin]

That's DRM for you.

if you can stream a tv show but not a live sporting event that is Digital restrictions working againist you.

Re:streaming live media

[bWareiWare.co.uk]

The tag doesn't actually define much, most browser implementations are choosing to concentrating on HTTP streaming of h.264 or WebM, as such are still fairly limited. I think Safari streams MPEG TS files rather well, but given the is still no video support at all in Internet Explorer, the lowest common denominator is a problem.

Re:streaming live media

[Idimmu Xul]

No, it's not related to DRM at all

From http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/blog/11887/html5-video-not-quite-there-yet

HTML5 does not specify a streaming mechanism yet. While this is being worked on (W3C: Fragments, Media Multitrack API), it means that live, DVR and long-form video content cannot be played using a video tag. Most browsers do provide an alternative, such as utilizing the range request header to do pseudo-streaming, but this is no long-term solution.

Re:streaming live media

[Idimmu Xul]

It'll kind of suck though if the HTML5 video tag is useful for only youtube-esque sites, it would be nice if it was thought out enough to also work with live streams, as other wise we're still going to need all manner of plugins and things, and might as well just stick to flash and not bother with it?

Re:streaming live media

[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly what is happening in the industry - why should anyone bother with html5 when it offers less functionality than Flash and if it ever actually got anywhere, would take us back to the days of "this website is best viewed with [xxxxxxxxx] browser."

It's a shame, but Html5 is several years away, and always will be.

Re:streaming live media

[sjames]

Exactly. By not at least minimally supporting live streaming, they are actually working very hard to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. It's even worse that they haven't done proper support for audio streaming. They must have been living under a rock for the last 12 years to not know there would be some demand for that.

Internet Time

[tarsi210]

Oh, right, because everything on the Internet takes about 5 years to come out. Everyone will wait for you, W3C. We've got Livejournals to keep us amused till then.

Seriously, though -- wouldn't we be that much better off if they would release the standard right now as, "final pending revisions for bugs", or similar, so the world can move on and not fall into 14 different camps of what is official and what isn't?

(I realize in a lot of ways this is all about terminology, but terminology matters, too. )

Re:Internet Time

[commodore6502]

Most likely companies will do with HTML5 the same as they did with 28k and later 56k modems. Release the new technology 1-2 years ahead, and then make it reprogrammable to match the final standard.

Re:Internet Time

[Anonymous Coward]

Most likely companies will do with HTML5 the same as they did with 28k and later 56k modems. Release the new technology 1-2 years ahead, and then make it reprogrammable to match the final standard.

I still do not have a patch for my k56flex!

Re:Internet Time

[Draek]

Nope. An incomplete standard would lead into incompatible extensions by each browser, which would lead into the same fragmentation we've got right now except the devs document their extensions properly in hopes they'd eventually get adopted as the official standard, incentive they'd lack if said standard were 'final'.

And btw, what we've got to entertain us in the meantime isn't LiveJournal, but Flash ;)

Licensing

[bcmm]

Don't forget that Flash on mobiles is basically a scam: Flash is only free of charge for "computers" (RTFEULA for definition). Adobe is charging a license fee to mobile device manufacturers who want to include Flash player. AFAIK, that even includes updates, meaning that Flash updates stop for devices that are no longer supported by a manufacturer, like the N900. Of course, Adobe can hold people to ransom over paid updates by making sure that content created with their newest authoring tools won't play on old versions...

Re:Licensing

[Americano]

No no no. Doesn't matter. Flash is open. H.264 and HTML5 are closed, and require onerous patent licensing terms of pennies per unit, with a hard cap.

It's much better to trust a single company, Adobe, to play nicely, rather than publish a standard and allow all manufacturers to implement it if they wish.

In other news, up is also down, and black is also white.

Re:Licensing

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The other issue, aside from Adobe squeezing the sector for all it is worth, is that a fair amount of the Flash out there was really built with the performance of fairly beefy wintels in mind. Aside from Atoms, basically the cheapest and nastiest computer you can find on the shelf these days is running an A64 derivative in the 2GHz range, backed by a couple gigs of RAM, and an embedded video chip that probably has the same die area as your phone's entire ARM SoC.

Having flash is useful in certain legacy cases(if you must have StrongBad on the go, that was running fine on 600MHz P3s, a decade ago...) or just plain maldesigned websites(Hey! instead of providing an HTML link on our useless flash-splash page, let's embed the link in the flash!), or use cases that just dump a video stream right to the hardware decoder(though using flash to do this is comparatively pointless).

For things like games, though, (or even just ghastly banner ads), your battery life and system responsiveness will quickly inform you that most Flash out there was really designed for a much more powerful system.

Re:Licensing

[bWareiWare.co.uk]

Actually it is even more stupid. They no longer charge a license fee, but only 'trust' vendors to release working players. http://www.openscreenproject.org/partners/apply.html Given the quality and length of support any hardware vendor gives compared to the community this is just spiteful.

Re:Licensing

[Threni]

Is every company which licenses IP to manufacturers also engaging in a scam? Because..and you might want to sit down first.. there are many, many items on the average phone/pc which have been licensed.

Re:Licensing

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

In the context of the mobile phone market, where the end user is rather limited control over the firmware(without resorting to quite-unencouraged hackery), the scamminess is arguably much greater, in practical impact.

On a PC, say, it is quite likely that many, likely most, of the hardware components have a mess of patents and licenced code baked into their firmware. The same thing would apply to a phone's cellular baseband components. While the "free hardware" hard line might find that philosophically problematic(and the OSS guys practically so, if they have to build drivers that talk to the thicket 'o secrets inside); It is also likely, outside of a FOSS purist's system, that much of the software is licensed.

However, on a PC, it is typically the case that drivers are available at least until the next significant revision of windows(except in the case of the chintziest printers and scanners and such rubbish) and any software can, either for free or for money, be upgraded as needed, until the hardware is just too antique to bother.

On the phone side, however, something like Flash is a licenced component; but it is not exactly a retail product. Unless your phone vendor wishes to pay adobe for X units and provide a firmware update, you are SOL. More generally, because of the challenges of embedded development, (and the explicit cryptographic hurdles placed in the way of 3rd parties who would try) phones are far harder for the end user to support for themselves. An x86 you can just keep updating until it isn't worth it. A phone? vendor firmware or hacking...

The "scam" isn't so much in the fact that adobe wishes to be paid; but in the fact that(because of the perversities of the ecosystem), Flash is a product that must be purchased to be updated; but simply isn't for sale to anybody except OEMs, Hooray for unnecessary obsolescence...

Re:Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear this for the first time to be honest. As far as I know participants of Open Screen Project can distribute Flash Player on their devices for free. Participation does not seem to have a fee. Nor does licensing agreement.

As for no Flash 10.1 on Maemo. Who supports it? Seems like platform owner Nokia abandoned not only it but its successor too now. If Nokia is not bothering why Adobe should?

Re:Licensing

[rsilvergun]

For what it's worth, Flash is open. I wrote a few simple apps in raw flex, and some much more complex ones with Open Laszlo. True, Adobe opened it up in a desperate (and largely successful) bid to survive Silverlight. The openness of Flash made it possible for me to write this, so all and all I can't complain. Not as a developer anyway.

Re:Licensing

[PortHaven]

Do you want to continue supporting old hardware. Cell phones have a 2 yr life cycle. By that point, they're obsolescent. Sure, people are still using them. But does ANYONE really expect them to get, and run the latest updates.

Sorry, that's a very weak argument....

As for the cost of mobile device makers using Flash. I think this is going to come down to platform. If you are running an ARM processor with a standard graphic. There will be little cost involved in porting Flash to your device. Some QA testing, etc.

But if you've got an in-house processor, or are doing something radically different. Expect there to be some costs involved porting Flash to your device. You can't really expect Adobe to make Flash player free for every phone out there. Not without the phone manufacturers picking up some slack.

Basically, it'll eventually boil down to Adobe giving some specs on the standard platforms, and saying "Hey, if you're developing an Android OS phone on ARM with x, y, and z specs. We charge a nominal compatibility testing fee.

Re:Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news, up is also down, and black is also white.

I am so happy that I fell into that oil stain. I had trouble to get my white shirt clean.

Re:Licensing

[CheerfulMacFanboy]

Do you want to continue supporting old hardware. Cell phones have a 2 yr life cycle.

The N900 the OP mentioned is only a little over 1 year old, and Nokia's high end model.

Re:Licensing

[bathyscaaf]

Check your facts. There has not been a license fee for Flash for a few years now, though that used to be the case. http://mobile.engadget.com/2008/05/06/adobe-kills-license-fees-for-flash-on-devices/

Re:Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not true. The player is free now. This was true of the FlashLite player.

Re:Licensing

[Salvo]

The only reason iPhone Clones are running Flash is the developers believe that will give them a competitive edge over Apple.
Unfortunately, all Flash compatibility on a Mobile Device does is dilute native development. BBC iPlayer is a native App on the iPhone while it is a Flash App on Android.
Android currently has a competitive edge due to misinterpretation of Market Share figures, They could have hundreds of native Apps and actually be a viable alternative to iOS on higher end devices, but instead will piss it all away reenforcing Adobe Flash as the "Write Once, Test Everywhere, still have a woeful experience" technology. Google's pissing contest with Oracle over Jalvik doesn't help the platform either.
"We're not evil, but we refuse to pay licencing to Oracle for Java, but love paying licensing to Adobe for Flash.

Re:Licensing

[BenoitRen]

You write Firefox add-ons/extensions, not plug-ins. :(

Re:Licensing

[c0lo]

For what it's worth, Flash is open.

Agreed... but since it doesn't worth too much, doesn't this lead to Flash qualifying for "barely open"?

Re:Licensing

[c0lo]

In other news, up is also down, and black is also white.

I am so happy that I fell into that oil stain. I had trouble to get my white shirt clean.

Gosh, what's with those white stains on your otherwise-shiny-clean black shirt?

Re:Licensing

[Salvo]

Most Android Phones currently for sale are lucky if they run 2.1 and the Hardware vendors aren't looking to update them to 2.2. They are current devices and they are already 2-generations obsolete.

Re:Licensing

[Anonymous Coward]

This whole thread has a lot of flat-out falsehoods in it, but your comment on licensing prompted me to get an overall objection into the record here.
http://www.openscreenproject.org/about/faq.html

Just pick an attack point and defend it. Don't go skipping over tons of made-up points in an effort to convince.

jd/adobe

Re:Licensing

[ukyoCE]

I finally removed flash from my main browsers (Safari and Firefox). I don't even using FlashBlock anymore since that lies to sites ("I want flash content!") and sometimes prevents html5 video from appearing. I use Chrome as my backup when I really need Flash, ie: to watch Fringe on Hulu once a week.

Whenever I do run Flash, it inevitably kicks one of my Core2Duo's cores to 100%. My laptop heats up, the fans kick on at full volume. Then I close down Chrome (which didn't have flash in the foreground or operating anyway, but maybe in a background tab) and the fan shuts off, cpu drops back down to 2-4% usage.

Having flash on my phone sounds about as good as towing a yacht with my bicycle. DO NOT WANT.

It'll be obsolete by then...

[EmagGeek]

3 years is an eternity in web time. By 2014, the web will have evolved once again into something nobody can foresee today.

It's a BAD thing when standards bodies cannot keep up with the technology they're attempting to regulate. Fortunately, the only outcome is that the standards body becomes irrelevant, which is what should happen to most of them.

Re:It'll be obsolete by then...

[Anonymous Coward]

3 years is an eternity in web time. By 2014, the web will have evolved once again into something nobody can foresee today.

It's a BAD thing when standards bodies cannot keep up with the technology they're attempting to regulate. Fortunately, the only outcome is that the standards body becomes irrelevant, which is what should happen to most of them.

Do you promote vendor locking on all fronts?

Re:It'll be obsolete by then...

[archen]

Looking at how long it's taken to get browsers even approaching standards compliance, I dread the spec not being finalized for another 3 years. But I tend to look at the bright side. That's another 3 years that HTML 4 will be the defacto standard and will allow pretty much every thing that can read html to standardize on. Hell even IE might support it correctly 3 years from now. A moving target is very hard to implement, and while HTML4 has been out forever, only recently has MS gotten on board with making the effort to support it. Whatever happens to HTML after this point, at least we'll always be able to make pages against the HTML4 standard and know they will render correctly in just about everything.

Re:It'll be obsolete by then...

[foom]

Nope. You've never been able to write pages against the HTML4 standard, and you certainly can't now. No browser "properly" implements HTML4, and to the best of my knowledge, never has, and never will. Just you try writing a document that looks like the below, and see if you can find a browser that renders it properly. Of course, if you do find such a browser, it probably can't render actual webpages properly...

This *is* valid HTML4 syntax:
<html<head<title/Foo/</><body<p<a href="foo"/link text/, hooray!</>

Re:It'll be obsolete by then...

[Anonymous Coward]

> 3 years is an eternity in web time

really the web it doesn't look really *that* much different from the late 90's - altavista, cu-seeme, newsgroups, geocites....sure there have been improvements but nothing really revolutionary other than the larger userbase.

Re:It'll be obsolete by then...

[geekoid]

No it's not an eternity. What technology is running website right now that no one foresaw 3 years ago?

Name one.

Re:It'll be obsolete by then...

[nog_lorp]

Exactly what is happening here. Nobody gives a flying fuck what the W3C says / plans. WhatWG has been the real body running things.

Re:It'll be obsolete by then...

[BZ]

To become a Recommendation (which is the 2014 date here), a standard has to be written, then an exhaustive test suite for it needs to be created, and then two implementations need to pass the test suite.

The goal is apparently to be done with that first step this year; the expectation is that writing the hundreds of thousands of tests and then fixing the thousands of browser bugs that they will uncover will take several years.

I suspect that the 2014 timeframe is too optimistic, personally.

Re:It'll be obsolete by then...

[Dynedain]

How much of the HTML5 spec, still 5 years away, is already in production use today?

It's not a matter of forseeing, it's a matter of getting the specs out in a timely manner compared to implementations. Otherwise you'll lead to the fragmentation battles that plagued CSS. The box model is a great example. The spec wasn't clear, Moz and MS implemented different solutions, and the next version of the spec settled on the Moz solution, pissing off MS.

Right now vendors are implementing the preliminary specs, and there is inconstancy. W3C waiting for 2014 is basically them saying "We'll let the market sort it out and then stamp our approval on the defacto winner". If you're going to follow that approach, what's the point of the standards body to begin with?

Re:It'll be obsolete by then...

[Waccoon]

Most people want something simple that works. It's the designers, managers, and focus groups that want all the flashy crap.

That's pretty much why companies are drooling over 3D graphics while we still have major layout and alignment issues to work out even when using standards compliant code, and every browser is obsessing about JavaScript speed, as if running 3rd-party JavaScript from any other site on the Internet isn't even the slightest bit of a security concern and needs to be addressed.

I mean, come on... perfect 3-column layout is still an art form and only really works well if you hard code to a specific screen resolution. I thought the whole point of markup meant I was describing content, and didn't have to worry about specific resolutions. Why don't percentages work as expected? Why is it when I increase the font size, content breaks out of its container and obscures other sections? Well, it's far more important to use box shadows to create faux, glossy, Aqua-style buttons. If it wasn't for the max-width property, I'd write off CSS3 as a total disappointment, and I can't believe it took until HTML5 to get a "menu" tag, seeing how the most screwed up markup I've ever seen is for the most fundamental element of any web site: navigation.

Personally, I think the standards bodies are focusing too much on technology, while even the simplest problems go unsolved. Engineering by committee is not a pretty sight, and the war cry over standards compliance is hardly a help when everyone knows the actual standard itself is a complete mess, and always has been. Nothing getting rid of version numbers won't fix, I'm sure.

Re:It'll be obsolete by then...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's obsolete now.

Due to HTML5 being the farce it is, the "semantic" tags for example are already out of date.

They were decided upon based upon an early/pre-web 2.0 survey of common tag names/ids.

The problem is, since then, we've seen a proliferation of things like comments sections yet there is no semantic comments or comment tag.

This is the problem with embedding things that will change overtime in a spec, and I suspect this is why WHATWG want it to be a living spec- because they don't actually understand how to write future proof specs.

The sensible option would've been to allow semantics to be applied to tags using a semantic definition language like you apply styles with CSS. This would've been flexible and futureproof with benefits such as allowing 3rd parties to provide semantic information for no longer maintained sites.

If you look at a spec like XML, it's generic, it doesn't matter what happens in the future, it can change with it, it's also why an enforced codec for the video tag was a bad idea- you can never guarantee a single codec will fit everyone's purposes now, and in the future. Really, you don't need anything more than the object tag and let the browser keep uptodate to what to support with that.

Unfortunately WHATWG just isn't this smart, and so we've got this abomination that contains many out of date elements years before it's even finalised. Besides, minimal specs don't seem to be in fashion right now, it seems to be all about the redundant bloat with web standards right now because apparently this makes things easier. Personally whatever happens, I'll just stick to using the minimal consistent subset I need and strict XML markup, that way I wont be the one wondering why my web applications are such a pain to look after years down the line.

Re:It'll be obsolete by then...

[nog_lorp]

As a matter of fact, there really isn't all that much inconsistency to begin with.

Flash floods in 2014 OH MY GAWD!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

I was worried about the end of the world in 2012, but now I see we will have Flash Floods in 2014 too?!?!?!
panic!

Flash: The iceberg melting

[snookiex]

I don't think the smile on the Adobe's face lasts too much. They better reinvent themselves, because Photoshop & Co aside they don't have too many things to support their position (not that they're not good products, but it's just not enough to stand the way Adobe does now).

Re:Flash: The iceberg melting

[cgenman]

Adobe has:

Industry Essentials / can't live without - Photoshop, Illustrator, PDF, InDesign, Dreamweaver (arguable)
Not dominant, but competitive - After Effects, Premiere Pro

I'm sure they're always looking for a new acquisition. But I can't imagine any creative industry avoiding Adobe products entirely, no matter how hard they tried.

Re:Flash: The iceberg melting

[snookiex]

PDF? It's an ISO standard, and according to Wikipedia "Adobe holds patents to PDF, but licenses them for royalty-free use in developing software complying with its PDF specification". I don't know how that can make a competitive advantage for Adobe. Like I said in the first post Photoshop and the design suite are their "only" valuable asset (note the quotes). Without Flash they won't be game changers anymore.

Re:Flash: The iceberg melting

[PortHaven]

Flash IDE is already being used for other development (ie: iOS). Expect Flash IDE to output HTML5 content in the next version or so.

Even if Flash goes the way side, expect Flash IDE to remain, and just export to HTML5.

---

Adobe does not make their money off the technology, rather, they make their money off the IDEs.

Re:Flash: The iceberg melting

[BitZtream]

I'd love the flash editor if it would output SVG ... a standard Adobe helped to create and used to force Macromedia to sell out ... which it then promptly and completely abandon and refuses to properly support in any product it makes.

Re:Flash: The iceberg melting

[snookiex]

Yeah, that would be great. Javascript + SVG is a winner combination to replace Flash, but [most of] graphical designers won't want to know anything about coding, the "IDE" is the key.

HTML5 vs HTML and W3C vs WHATWG

[no known priors]

So, just to clarify for all you people who haven't realized yet, there are two different groups working on HTML at the moment.

• The W3C HTML Working Group, which is putting together the final HTML 5 spec. (Which will consist of various things that have at least two independent implementations.)
• The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group is working on various new HTML stuff, and is getting new stuff into browsers as soon as possible. Experimenting with new tags and so on.

For all you professional corporate/big org types, I strongly suggest continuing to work with HTML 4.01 Strict (and/or XHTML 1.1 as appropriate). OK, you could go with HTML 5 if you really want to, but the difference is, that it isn't stable yet. And is it really sensible/professional to create corporate/big org pages that might not get touched for five years if the "standard" you are basing the pages on, isn't even standard?

For your personal website, use whatever you want. But if you aren't using features of the new HTML5, I suggest you don't use it. (Personally, I think the new form stuff is awesome, but haven't noticed much else that I would use as yet.)

Re:HTML5 vs HTML and W3C vs WHATWG

[geekoid]

I disagree.

The only person who would think like that is a contractor who want's to come back in 2 years to do teh same work again.

Begin going to 5 now. Use it wisely.

Pipe dream.

[Tei]

The people that create these flash, create flash slow enough to eat the 60% of the CPU of a Double Core 2 GHz.
How much horsepower is the 60% of a Double Core 2 GHz: more than the horsepower than a mobile decide have. So that flash with almost stop the mobile device.

The only way so flash is usable in mobile devices, is if the people that make these flash test then in slow mobile devices, and decide to remove some effect, be conservative. Good luck with that, has the same problem hit PC's, and these people don't learn.

Adobe could, somehow, help here creating a special mode for the flash player called "Emulate slow device", so people could experience how shitty is his flash creation in a mobile device, but Adobe itself is lazy and will not provide that.

Re:Pipe dream.

[Neil Boekend]

Plz 2 be going back 2 4chan.

Where is the -1 Unreadable when you need it?

Re:Pipe dream.

[Anonymous Coward]

Where is the -1 Unreadable when you need it?

It will be there once you realise that not every slashdot poster is a native english speaker.

Re:Pipe dream.

[StuartHankins]

You're fairly new here, so I thought I'd explain.

Tei mentions that Flash takes a lot of processor power even in a dual-core system, and believes that this amount of usage would overly tax less capable mobile devices. His (her?) idea is to have a mobile emulation mode available to allow developers to model Flash on those devices, and in the process perhaps streamline some of the extra effects to improve mobile device performance. (That's a pretty damn good idea, BTW.)

In this community, there exist many people who don't speak English as a first language. I'm not talking about leetspeak. I'm not sure if you're trying to be funny, but you come across as another angsty teenager spewing hatred, and we have plenty of that on the web already.

Re:Pipe dream.

[Draek]

Just because your native language isn't English doesn't mean your post isn't unreadable, and I can't see why pointing that out would make the GP an "angsty teenager spewing hatred".

And if you care, my native language is Spanish and I'm certainly neither 'angsty' nor a 'teenager'.

Re:Pipe dream.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do me a favour, and give me two games / sites that have EXACTLY the same functionality one with Flash, one with HTML5. Then we'll take a look. I'm not talking about simple rollover animations (that should already be done with HTML4 anyway). Right now, my computer seems to run advanced Flash content better than corresponding HTML5 -- and my machine's 5-6 years old based on AGP.

It's almost as retarded as that guy who blocked Flash (without replacing it with even an HTML5 equivalent), measured battery life of a laptop, then let Flash run, measured battery life again and proclaimed "OMG FLASHBATTARY IZ TEH SUXXORZ AND TEH HTML5z ROXORZ". Well, DUH. Try replacing it an HTML5 version of the ads / content... then we'll talk.

Re:Pipe dream.

[Neil Boekend]

I am not a native English speaker. My native language is Dutch.

Re:Pipe dream.

[Neil Boekend]

My native language isn't English. However I do have another Germanic language as a base: Dutch. This helps with getting the grammar (mostly) correct. I did not consider Tei would be a non-Germanic speaker and thus having a greater difficulty in learning English. I guess I would make most the same mistakes when attempting to learn a non-Germanic language. I am sorry.
It was mostly a comment indicating I was truly unable to read it. The link to 4chan was meant as a joke, albeit a bad and insulting one. I am sorry about that.
As I can see in your post, his/her idea seems great, but I was unable to decipher it from the original post.

Re:Pipe dream.

[StuartHankins]

Thank you for understanding and for your classy reply. A bit of humanity is a refreshing change from the content we see on here at times.

**woosh**

[Anonymous Coward]

WOOSH

When the OS lacks a codec

[tepples]

A browser that relies on the OS for support for thousands of different codecs

Such a browser could not run correctly on a free operating system because most popular audio and video codecs used on the Internet are covered by one or more patents licensed incompatibly with free software. Case in point: In Ubuntu, Software Center and Synaptic put up a big scary warning of potential patent infringement when the user tries to install anything related to FFmpeg.

Re:When the OS lacks a codec

[rjstanford]

A browser that relies on the OS for support for thousands of different codecs

Such a browser could not run correctly on a free operating system because most popular audio and video codecs used on the Internet are covered by one or more patents licensed incompatibly with free software. Case in point: In Ubuntu, Software Center and Synaptic put up a big scary warning of potential patent infringement when the user tries to install anything related to FFmpeg.

So? If you need the codec, it has to come from somewhere, not the magical codec fairy in the sky. Either its in the OS (once), in each app (a few times), or provided as software as part of your stream (every video), but its coming from somewhere either way.

Do you expect every application to come with its own set of printer drivers, too?

Re:When the OS lacks a codec

[Kenshin]

Such a browser could not run correctly on a free operating system...

Forget the "Free Operating System" for a sec. 99% of people use a non-free operating system. Should we forget streamlining for those people because a few FOSS people don't like the idea?

The advantage of this is that it would allow FREE browsers, like Firefox, to support needed codecs without having to besmirch themselves with non-free (icky!) code.

Re:When the OS lacks a codec

[tepples]

Either its in the OS (once)

AVC patents rule out this method for a free operating system.

in each app (a few times)

AVC patents rule out this method for a free web browser.

Do you expect every application to come with its own set of printer drivers, too?

Often, each app does come with its own routines to generate a PostScript file that it uses the operating system's facilities to send to the printer or to Ghostscript, just as each browser might come with its own routines to generate a stream of decoded frames that it uses the operating system's facilities to send to the video card.

Re:When the OS lacks a codec

[bonch]

Better tell Google. Chrome ships with built-in MP3 and AAC support.

Re:When the OS lacks a codec

[tepples]

Only a company as big as Google has the volume to afford to hit the annual royalty caps. Smaller companies such as Opera do not.

Re:When the OS lacks a codec

[BitZtream]

If your free OS provided a standard plugin system then you could get your codec for the free OS.

That is unless you're enforcing some other restriction that you haven't actually said like:

1) Has to come free with my OS cause I don't ever want to pay for anything at all, ever, never.

2) My OS developers or my idealogical crusade against the man prevents me from using software that I can't see the source too even though I have absolutely no clue what the source actually does nor the ability to change it.

The reality of it is, having a system wide codec system, which the browser can then use takes ALL the code for out of the browser and the OS and lets you plug it in. The only thing stopping you at that point is your own personal objections, which frankly, no one cares about that particular group of people because you're going to bitch, moan and whine unless whatever it is you're fanboying for gets what you want exactly the way you want it. The world isn't going to change to support an irrelevant portion of the population on some idealogical crusade that no one else cares about. You should probably face reality.

Your OS can certainly DO it, you just don't it want to, thats your problem, not anyone elses. The rest of the world isn't going to wait around for you.

Re:When the OS lacks a codec

[BitZtream]

The most you EVER have to pay is $10k/year.

Thats less than the cost of someones office.

They can afford it, you're going to need a new argument.

Re:When the OS lacks a codec

[BenoitRen]

Steve Ballmer, is that you?

Re:When the OS lacks a codec

[tepples]

If your free OS provided a standard plugin system

Windows Media, QuickTime, and GStreamer. So that's covered, as long as some advertiser is willing to front the money for Windows Media plug-ins for users of Windows pre-7 and GStreamer plug-ins for Linux users.

That is unless you're enforcing some other restriction that you haven't actually said like:

1) Has to come free with my OS cause I don't ever want to pay for anything at all, ever, never.

Notice how most popular web sites are donation-supported (in the case of Wikipedia) or advertising-supported (in the case of most of the rest of the top 20) rather than paywalled.

2) My OS developers or my idealogical crusade against the man prevents me from using software that I can't see the source too even though I have absolutely no clue what the source actually does nor the ability to change it.

It's not whether the end user himself can improve the software as much as whether the end user can choose to hire any programming consultant to improve the software. Would you buy a house without its blueprints?

The reality of it is, having a system wide codec system, which the browser can then use takes ALL the code for out of the browser and the OS and lets you plug it in.

Windows, Mac, and Linux all have such a system. It's just that people with older versions of Windows aren't likely to already have a licensed copy of an AVC decoder installed at the operating system level.

Re:When the OS lacks a codec

[icebraining]

If your free OS provided a standard plugin system then you could get your codec for the free OS.

No OS provides a plugin system, they provide a multimedia framework, and GNU/Linux has one: GStreamer.

1) Has to come free with my OS cause I don't ever want to pay for anything at all, ever, never.

I don't like paying MPEG-LA (composed of abusive companies like Sony and Microsoft) to use a decoder they haven't developed (x264).

2) My OS developers or my idealogical crusade against the man prevents me from using software that I can't see the source too even though I have absolutely no clue what the source actually does nor the ability to change it.

First, there are OSS solutions.
Second, claiming that OSS only helps developers is very ignorant.

Re:When the OS lacks a codec

[tepples]

First, there are OSS solutions.

Not with 1. rate-distortion performance that matches AVC high profile (VP8 is more like AVC baseline) and 2. legality in the United States, one of the largest industrialized single-language markets.

Re:When the OS lacks a codec

[rjstanford]

So don't install the H.264 codec. But don't install it once. Problem solved - and its entirely under your control. If you want to view H.264 video though, that codec is needed ... somewhere. Viewing it "in flash" just means that the codec is downloaded as part of the flash plugin rather than discreetly. But its still there.

...just as each browser might come with its own routines to generate a stream of decoded frames that it uses the operating system's facilities to send to the video card.

It could do this. But it doesn't. It uses OS-level graphic libraries. Or are you honestly suggesting that you want to have to rebuild your browser whenever you change video cards?

Oh, never mind...

Re:When the OS lacks a codec

[tepples]

...just as each browser might come with its own routines to generate a stream of decoded frames that it uses the operating system's facilities to send to the video card.

It could do this. But it doesn't. It uses OS-level graphic libraries. Or are you honestly suggesting that you want to have to rebuild your browser whenever you change video cards?

Please allow me to rephrase: "...just as each browser might come with its own routines to generate a stream of decoded frames that it uses the operating system's facilities to send to the video card through the OS-level graphic libraries." Which should the browser send to the OS: compressed video or decompressed frames?

Only root can install plug-ins

[tepples]

Plugins have existed since the earliest days of browsers (like quicktime plugin to view embedded movies)(or wav plugin to deal with sounds). Why do you think that is an inferior method?

Because only root can install plug-ins, and root might either A. disapprove of a plug-in, or B. not be around when you visit a site that needs a plug-in.

Re:Only root can install plug-ins

[TeXMaster]

Plugins have existed since the earliest days of browsers (like quicktime plugin to view embedded movies)(or wav plugin to deal with sounds). Why do you think that is an inferior method?

Because only root can install plug-ins,

Bullshit.

Re:Only root can install plug-ins

[tepples]

Plugins have existed since the earliest days of browsers (like quicktime plugin to view embedded movies)(or wav plugin to deal with sounds). Why do you think that is an inferior method?

Because only root can install plug-ins,

Bullshit.

OK, only anyone with permission to write to an executable folder can install plug-ins. I assume that you're referring to installation of plug-ins to a single user's account by that user, but in a tightly secured system (/home mounted noexec under UNIX or Software Restriction Policies under Windows), this is root (under UNIX) or a member of the Administrators group (under Windows). On some devices, even the owner of the machine might not have permission to install executable files that the device's manufacturer has not approved.

Re:Only root can install plug-ins

[BitZtream]

I'm not sure what he's referring too, but I'm referring to the plugins directory under my home directory that allows me to install codecs for myself without root. But hey, just because your OS doesn't do it, certainly means no OS does it.

Re:Only root can install plug-ins

[tepples]

I'm referring to the plugins directory under my home directory that allows me to install codecs for myself without root.

Which doesn't work if your user account is subject to Software Restriction Policies under Windows or a home directory mounted noexec under Linux or *BSD. This might be the case in a public library, Internet cafe, or workplace. In such a situation, all plug-ins must be installed system-wide by an administrator.

just because your OS doesn't do it, certainly means no OS does it.

To which OS do you refer, if not Windows, Linux, or *BSD?

Re:Only root can install plug-ins

[TeXMaster]

I'm referring to the plugins directory under my home directory that allows me to install codecs for myself without root.

Which doesn't work if your user account is subject to Software Restriction Policies under Windows or a home directory mounted noexec under Linux or *BSD. This might be the case in a public library, Internet cafe, or workplace. In such a situation, all plug-ins must be installed system-wide by an administrator.

I have no idea about SRP in Windows, but mounting noexec under Linux shouldn't prevent plugins from being loaded, since they are not executables but shared objects.

Re:Only root can install plug-ins

[tepples]

mounting noexec under Linux shouldn't prevent plugins from being loaded, since they are not executables but shared objects.

I thought the shared object loader respected noexec, or at least was configurable to do so. See, for example, this thread:

$ /lib/ld-linux.so.2 /tmp/ls
/tmp/ls: error while loading shared libraries: /tmp/ls: failed to map segment from shared object: Operation not permitted

No bias here

[AdrianKemp]

So Adobe says flash is really going to take off in the mobile sector eh? Surely I can take their word for that completely, knowing that they are completely free from bias in the matter.

Disclaimer: I don't know what Nokia uses, but I do know what they're using going forward.
Most of the (new wave of) mobile devices out there are using webkit for a rendering engine. Regardless of the HTML5 spec being finalized, most mobile browsers work exactly the same simply because they're using the same guts. IE9 doesn't use webkit but it does render things quite brilliantly if you don't go too crazy on proprietary tags.

When you're doing HTML5 stuff for mobile it falls into two catagories; either you are (1) building an app of some sort for a platform, or (2) building a media-rich website.

for #1 you can use whatever special tags you want knowing that it's a fairly straightforward matter to customize it for other platforms (ie. IE9 vs. webkit). Chances are you're making a different app for each platform anyways to keep consistent with the look and feel.

for #2 you shouldn't be using any crazy proprietary tags for your web presence and all new mobile browsers support enough of the HTML5 spec to create a lovely page. The only possible issue here is that Google is trying to wage war against a perfectly good video format, but that's Google acting like a 5 year old, not a problem with HTML5.

Bottom line: Flash is already dead in the mobile space, and it's only going to get more dead going forward. Adobe might be saying their product will do really well because, say, they make it.

Re:No bias here

[perryizgr8]

I don't know what Nokia uses, but I do know what they're using going forward.

nokia was perhaps the first one to have a webkit browser in their phones. hasn't stopped the browsers from sucking, though.

Re:No bias here

[BenoitRen]

The only possible issue here is that Google is trying to wage war against a perfectly good video format, but that's Google acting like a 5 year old, not a problem with HTML5.

H.264 is not perfectly good. Stop spreading bullshit and acting like a 5-year-old that doesn't want to let go of his favourite toy.

Re:No bias here

[c0lo]

Disclaimer: I don't know what Nokia uses, but I do know what they're using going forward

(tl;dr). Let me guess: Windows7?

How is HTML5 closed and patented?

[tepples]

Doesn't matter. Flash is open.

Your post was intended as sarcasm, but in fact, SWF has been open for about two years since the Open Screen Project changed the licensing terms for the SWF spec.

H.264 and HTML5 are closed, and require onerous patent licensing terms of pennies per unit, with a hard cap.

What royalty-bearing technology is included in HTML5 and WebM? If you're referring to the patent on the 2D canvas, Apple has agreed to license that without royalty, as has Google with respect to its VP8 patents.

Re:How is HTML5 closed and patented?

[Americano]

What royalty-bearing technology is included in HTML5 and WebM?

Nice straw man, I never mentioned WebM, champ. But, since you brought it up:

With the exception of Youtube, which will convert because Google owns them, no content producer of any size will re-encode their entire library and double their disk space allocation simply to support WebM, *especially* because they will not freeze out the entire existing ecosystem of H.264-in-hardware-capable devices - there's no appreciable benefit to shifting formats - aside from some vague fuzzy feeling for "supporting openness," whatever that means - and there are significant costs to shifting away from H.264 and moving to WebM as well.

So, people who have browsers and devices that don't support native H.264 video via HTML video tags will simply receive the H.264 video wrapped in a Flash player. WebM support will be "that thing Youtube uses," and if it's not done well, it'll be "that thing Youtube used to use before we all started using other sites like Vimeo."

You know this, I know this, let's stop pretending that WebM is somehow going to change a fucking thing until and unless Flash is dead. And since Google - who is also pushing WebM - is the one propping Flash up in the interests of "openness," WebM is effectively dead on arrival.

Re:How is HTML5 closed and patented?

[quacking duck]

H.264 and HTML5 are closed, and require onerous patent licensing terms of pennies per unit, with a hard cap.

What royalty-bearing technology is included in HTML5 and WebM? If you're referring to the patent on the 2D canvas, Apple has agreed to license that without royalty, as has Google with respect to its VP8 patents.

Looks like Apple learned their lesson from the Firewire licensing fiasco, which lit a fire under the USB2 standard and pushed the decidedly superior technology into irrelevance.

Re:How is HTML5 closed and patented?

[tepples]

no content producer of any size will re-encode their entire library

This can be done gradually, as YouTube did when it reencoded all its videos after the iPhone came out to add AVC alongside its existing FLV.

and double their disk space allocation

Disk space is cheap.

*especially* because they will not freeze out the entire existing ecosystem

Sites already licensed to encode and serve AVC will continue to use AVC, even if they adopt WebM alongside it. New sites not needing to target iDevices or devices with old versions of Android OS may use WebM exclusively.

of H.264-in-hardware-capable devices

VP8 is so similar to AVC (see article 377) that any programmable DSP capable of AVC can likely be reprogrammed for VP8.

Re:How is HTML5 closed and patented?

[Americano]

Sites already licensed to encode and serve AVC will continue to use AVC, even if they adopt WebM alongside it. New sites not needing to target iDevices or devices with old versions of Android OS may use WebM exclusively.

They won't adopt WebM along side it. They can serve Flash-wrapped AVC, after all that's one of the big selling points of Android - "It runs flash!"

New sites that don't take iDevices into account? Only if they don't want to make money. Why, when a single alternative format exists, would you encode in such a way that deliberately cuts out 10's of millions of people who have enough money to buy an iOS device, and who are, in all likelihood, more willing to spend to purchase online than other mobile device users? (See: success of Itunes store, paid-app sales, and iOS in-app purchases). You could, instead, encode to H.264 / AVC, and serve that up natively to the devices that support it, and then wrap that same H.264 content in Flash for devices that need Flash to play H.264.

Otherwise, you're encoding in AVC for iDevices, WebM for others, and perhaps Flash-wrapped AVC or WebM for a third (and perhaps fourth!) category of devices. It just makes no sense, when there is no compelling benefit to switch to WebM for any online/streaming use - it's already royalty free for them, and consumers pay a few pennies per unit for the built-in H.264 hardware support, and that situation will remain constant until 2016.

The final patent on H.264 expires in 2028; in the 11-year window between 2017 (when the current royalty terms are up for review) and 2028, which means that there are 2.2 license review periods between now and the expiration. MPEG-LA has specifically built into their agreement that the royalty cost will not increase more than 10% in a given renewal period. So you're looking at a possible ~20% increase in the fees until the patents expire on the current set of technologies.

This makes licensing fees very simple, and pretty easy to forecast and budget for, versus the unknowns of WebM/VP8. Until WebM has stood up to a patent challenge or two or three, I wouldn't expect anybody beyond Google to seriously consider adopting it - Google's assurances that there aren't any infringing parts won't do anything to help a small company avoid getting slapped with "pay royalties or desist" court orders, for that you need a court ruling. As you noted yourself, "VP8 is so similar to AVC that any programmable DSP capable of AVC can likely be reprogrammed for VP8." Which very possibly means that, despite google's best intentions, there ARE parts of VP8 that may infringe.

Re:How is HTML5 closed and patented?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well here's the bottom line, as soon as people realized that html5 would have taken us back to the days of "this website is best viewed with browser" it was dead in the water.

Anyone with any technical knowledge of the web would've seen that one coming.

Adobe have finally done the right thing with recent versions of the flash player e.g. properly unifying it across platforms, and the new gpu accelerated features are incredible.

Now you can crap on about ios devices and fact that they don't seem to be powerful enough to run flash, but the rest of the world doesn't care - they'll just carry on using it.

It seems to be axiomatic of apple fans that they forget they don't represent every computer user out there; it's pretty clear that steve jobs has discovered this also with the flash on the iphone debacle.

Re:How is HTML5 closed and patented?

[CheerfulMacFanboy]

no content producer of any size will re-encode their entire library

This can be done gradually, as YouTube did when it reencoded all its videos after the iPhone came out to add AVC alongside its existing FLV.

For most videos the "reencoding" consisted of moving the H.264 video out of the Flash container. Taking the patented bits out of the H.264 stream will be a little harder, even for Google.

Re:How is HTML5 closed and patented?

[Salvo]

SWF is open like WebM and PDF.
Adobe still control the specification for SWF and PDF, Apple still pay huge license fees for Display Postscript in MacOSX. Only Adobe can change the spec. Adobe refused to let Microsoft bundle their own implementation in Windows 7. That is not what I call Open.

WebM is still controlled by Google. It goes one step closer to being closed that PDF; Google have stated that their Implementation overrides the spec, meaning third-party implementations will never be 100% compatible. When they submit the spec to ISO, or MPEG, or OSI, it will be Open, but until they relinquish control it will still be a closed corporate tool like VC-1 and FairPlay DRM.

H.264 is an ISO standard. The spec is maintained by an Open committee that can be joined by anyone who is an expert on video encoding. Even MPEG-LA don't have control of the spec, they just handle the licensing. There are multiple different implementations of the spec, several commercial and at least one GPLed. You can't get more open than that unless you throw out the US Patent System.

Re:How is HTML5 closed and patented?

[BenoitRen]

Well here's the bottom line, as soon as people realized that html5 would have taken us back to the days of "this website is best viewed with browser" it was dead in the water.

Spoke like an ignorant who thinks HTML5 consists of nothing more than the video and audio elements.

Re:How is HTML5 closed and patented?

[c0lo]

SWF is open like WebM and PDF.
Adobe still control the specification for SWF and PDF, [...] Only Adobe can change the spec. Adobe refused to let Microsoft bundle their own implementation in Windows 7. That is not what I call Open.

Based on the facts selected above, if history teaches something, it would be: Adobe will control the spec until Oracle buys them. (*duck*)

Re:How is HTML5 closed and patented?

[tepples]

For most videos the "reencoding" consisted of moving the H.264 video out of the Flash container.

Really? I thought Flash had used H.263 (Sorenson Spark) and VP6 before adopting AVC.

Re:How is HTML5 closed and patented?

[Anonymous Coward]

oh yes - i forget the stunning animation capabilities - http://www.optimum7.com/css3-man/

html5 is the emperors new technology and always has been - video never full-screens, youtube won't go near it, pages don't work if you don't have safari, pages are heavy, ads can't be blocked, it looks and runs like crap : it's a larger than average pile of shit and most devs are coming around to that realization now (ignorant or not).

your zealous support for yet another failed web standard, is just not enough to make it float - when will you fanboys realize...?

Re:How is HTML5 closed and patented?

[icebraining]

video never full-screens

Works in Firefox 3.5+.

youtube won't go near it

http://www.youtube.com/html5

pages don't work if you don't have safari

[examples needed] (which don't specifically exclude other browsers through JS detection)

pages are heavy

Au contraire, they can be smaller thanks to new features:
* A couple of lines in CSS3 can replace an image (gradients, translucency)
* No need to serve a full video player in Flash (Youtube's is 150KB).

ads can't be blocked

Because they won't have images? Theyâ(TM)ll still be loaded from external domains (for analytics) and blocked that way. Self-hosted ads are rare.

Re:How is HTML5 closed and patented?

[exomondo]

ads can't be blocked

Because they won't have images? Theyâ(TM)ll still be loaded from external domains (for analytics) and blocked that way. Self-hosted ads are rare.

So you're suggesting blocking all externally loaded content on the basis that it must be ads?

Re:How is HTML5 closed and patented?

[icebraining]

Now, I'm saying it will require lists of URLs to be blocked, just like today.

Re:How is HTML5 closed and patented?

[exomondo]

Now, I'm saying it will require lists of URLs to be blocked, just like today.

Today you just block all flash and only allow the parts that you want that way unless you specifically select the ad it won't load/play.

Re:How is HTML5 closed and patented?

[CheerfulMacFanboy]

For most videos the "reencoding" consisted of moving the H.264 video out of the Flash container.

Really? I thought Flash had used H.263 (Sorenson Spark) and VP6 before adopting AVC.

Errm, "AVC" is H.264

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC

Re:How is HTML5 closed and patented?

[icebraining]

Most ads aren't in Flash. Adblockers work by having a list of filters (URLs) to block images and other ads, not only Flash.

If you wanted only to block animations, you could implement click-to-play on canvas & video tags; there is already a Greasemonkey script that does just that: https://github.com/andyli/CanvasBlock

Re:How is HTML5 closed and patented?

[exomondo]

Most ads aren't in Flash.

The most intrusive and annoying ones are.

If you wanted only to block animations, you could implement click-to-play on canvas & video tags

The easy workaround to that is embed them into the main canvas, which of course is easy to do in HTML5.

Re:How is HTML5 closed and patented?

[icebraining]

What main canvas?

Re:How is HTML5 closed and patented?

[exomondo]

What main canvas?

Whatever one that website happens to be using for it's main interactive content, it doesn't even have to be one, it could be many. The point is website owners want eyes on ads, flash ads are easy to block because they are separate from the website content, in HTML5 you can very easily embed the annoying and intrusive flash-style ads into the website content.

Re:How is HTML5 closed and patented?

[icebraining]

Well, for one most websites won't use canvas for content, just like most websites don't use Flash.
Those that will, currently use Flash and can embed ads there (see Hulu, Youtube, etc).

But even if they insert the canvas tag themselves, they'll still have to load external JS files to draw ads on it, so an adblocker can simply stop external scripts from accessing local canvases.

Re:How is HTML5 closed and patented?

[exomondo]

Well, for one most websites won't use canvas for content, just like most websites don't use Flash.

But most flash websites *do* use it for content, and most websites don't use flash but are you really going to go with the assumption that the only sites that will use HTML5 canvas are those that currently use flash?

Those that will, currently use Flash and can embed ads there (see Hulu, Youtube, etc).

That's a lot of assumptions, but the idea is that HTML5 is expected to be much more widely used than Flash so any content-rich site using canvas will have embedded flash-style ads. Your idea works on the assumption that the only sites that will use HTML5 canvas are those that currently use flash, obviously that's not the goal because being an open standard the idea is to get more widespread adoption for content-rich sites.

But even if they insert the canvas tag themselves, they'll still have to load external JS files to draw ads on it, so an adblocker can simply stop external scripts from accessing local canvases.

Now you've gone back to your external content filter again.

Re:How is HTML5 closed and patented?

[icebraining]

But most flash websites *do* use it for content, and most websites don't use flash but are you really going to go with the assumption that the only sites that will use HTML5 canvas are those that currently use flash?

Yes.

That's a lot of assumptions, but the idea is that HTML5 is expected to be much more widely used than Flash so any content-rich site using canvas will have embedded flash-style ads. Your idea works on the assumption that the only sites that will use HTML5 canvas are those that currently use flash, obviously that's not the goal because being an open standard the idea is to get more widespread adoption for content-rich sites.

Canvas is not useful to most "content-rich sites", which mostly have text, images and video.
Canvas is a way to programmatically draw dynamic shapes. This is not only useless for most websites, as it's very time consuming and leads to much worse performance.

Being an open standard might relevant when deciding to use canvas over Flash, but I doubt people will use much more canvas than they've used Flash 'till now. It's simply not worth the effort.

Now you've gone back to your external content filter again.

That's how current ad blockers work!

Ads have always some external content; how else would ad networks do user tracking, count page views, etc? Analytics are more important than ad blocking.

Re:How is HTML5 closed and patented?

[exomondo]

Yes.

i guess that means no-one who wanted to do flash-style stuff was limited by the lack of it on iOS devices then.

Now you've gone back to your external content filter again.

That's how current ad blockers work!

Ads have always some external content; how else would ad networks do user tracking, count page views, etc? Analytics are more important than ad blocking.

I think you've missed 2 key points here. Firstly it's not specifically all 'ads', its those that are the most intrusive and annoying, these are almost exclusively flash hence the common use of flash-blockers, but since these sites are HTML it is extremely easy to insert those kinds of ads even into existing canvas elements (being so easy it is something website owners are likely to do to get eyes on ads and earn money), it is nowhere near as easy to do this with flash, the developer has to develop some advertising system to incorporate into their flash binaries.
Secondly not all external content is ads.

Stay off my device!

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash will never be installed on my droid! Bloated piece of shit.

Frankly

[shish]

Who cares what the W3C says? WHATWG are the people who are actually getting stuff done -- and they're getting it done with real world implementations too.

Re:Frankly

[geekoid]

WHATWG cares what W3C says, and so should anyone in the business. They both provide different things.

Flash is at 10.2 not 10.1

[colfer]

Flash went to version 10.2 about a week ago on all the desktop platforms. Is it different on mobiles? Are they even updated? They aren't listed here:
http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/

Re:Flash is at 10.2 not 10.1

[Verunks]

it's still 10.1 you can see the update history at the end of the page http://www.appbrain.com/app/flash-player-10-1/com.adobe.flashplayer

Re:Flash is at 10.2 not 10.1

[colfer]

The 10.2 update was a security fix for "all platforms". I don't know if that included Android. Do these mobile systems have better sandboxxing than desktops? http://www.adobe.com/support/security/bulletins/apsb11-02.html
Then again, "all platforms" apparently does not include Mac OSX on PPC, which I read elsewhere is no longer supported AND not affected by the security problems.

Re:Flash is at 10.2 not 10.1

[PortHaven]

It also included a number of additional minor features, such as better multi-monitor support during fullscreen viewing.

bring back web database!

[Anonymous Coward]

I really hope that somehow http://www.w3.org/TR/webdatabase/ gets resurrected / browsers don't drop support.

It's a really cool way to do offline apps.

Yes I know there are some other APIs being worked on but they are missing a lot of features you get for free and with good performance with sqlite. Not to mention the possibility of using SQL on both the front end and back end (yes, I know nosql is all the rage these days, but it is still the fastest development time choice in a lot of uses cases still today)

Good, Riddance, Flash

[Anonymous Coward]

Adobe has had their chance to fix Flash, and now on the verge of becoming irrelevant, they are in a panic to do something about it. There's finally an open standard to replace flash so I say please move out of the way.

HTML5 Is Not a Flash Replacement

[organgtool]

Alright, I know it's popular to bash Flash on Slashdot and as much as I love open standards, it pains me to say that HTML5 by itself is NOT a Flash replacement. In order to get all of the features of Flash, you have to cobble together HTML5 + CSS + SVG + ECMAScript + Javascript + Canvas. To make matters worse, I have not seen a WYSIWYG tool for any of these technologies that comes even close to the development environment of Flash. Until this changes, I can't fault any developers for choosing to use Flash over HTML5 for their feature-rich content. That's why God invented ClickToFlash.

Re:HTML5 Is Not a Flash Replacement

[DragonWriter]

Alright, I know it's popular to bash Flash on Slashdot and as much as I love open standards, it pains me to say that HTML5 by itself is NOT a Flash replacement. In order to get all of the features of Flash, you have to cobble together HTML5 + CSS + SVG + ECMAScript + Javascript + Canvas.

Wow, that's redundant. You made that sound really big, but if you remove the redundant parts, that's just HTML5 + CSS + SVG + JavaScript, and ECMAScript & JavaScript are the same thing, and Canvas is an HTML element with a defined JavaScript API.

HTML (content) + CSS (presentation) + JavaScript (behavior) is pretty much the standard way for doing stuff on the web anyhow, even for things much simpler than you'd use Flash for.

Re:HTML5 Is Not a Flash Replacement

[Anonymous Coward]

But you are missing the point. Flash is nothing but the new animated gif. A gimmick or whatever you want to call it. It is mainly used for shock and awe marketing or for (imho) its only legitimate use, web video. With a solid video standard for web video, there is no pressing need for Flash, since all the hordes of YouTube users will be able to see their stuff without too much problems.

Re:HTML5 Is Not a Flash Replacement

[LS]

I have not seen a WYSIWYG tool for any of these technologies that comes even close to the development environment of Flash

Not released yet, but this might be it: Adobe Edge

Re:HTML5 Is Not a Flash Replacement

[Anonymous Coward]

Canvas is HTML5, and javascript is ECMAScript. HTML5 is designed to work with css, svg and javascript. I wouldn't call it cobbling.

I do agree about the dev environment though. But do we really want non-developers making RIA (which require a dual core 2 GHz 4 GB RAM machine to run)?

Re:HTML5 Is Not a Flash Replacement

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree, plus with the (finally) available code complete features of CS5 you don't have to use other tools like FlashDevelop to get some proper code IDE features. And whilst jQuery's widgets do make things a lot easier for all that kind of stuff, the Flex components still offer much more features.

Plus Flash still offers some features not readily available otherwise such as live streaming video and use of sockets which can both be very useful in creating web apps (although I know web sockets are going to become available one day).

And I still prefer actionscript to javascript, having untyped dynamic goodness everywhere is nice in a lot of situations but does make reading the code, especially when it isn't commented correctly a real pain.

Youtube will not drop Flash, it's

[Norsefire]

Flash isn't going anywhere as YouTube will not drop it due to limitations with the HTML5 video tag. Such as as no caching, no data protection, the difficulty in embedding the videos into other websites, no full-screen display, and a heap of other things that Google mentioned.

Re:Youtube will not drop Flash, it's

[geekoid]

That'as just wrong. You can define applicationcache to do it. You define it in your manifest.

Yeah I know, there isn't a great big shiny button for you to just click without thinking, so you probably missed it.

And full screen in the API is not a good idea, it should be handled by the browser. It opens up a myriad of security issues, as well as opened up an avenue for full screen video ads that the browser has minimal control over.

Oh, You're exaggerating

[rsilvergun]

StrongBad runs just fine on a Compy 386. Well, I guess it does run better in color on an $800 Compé.

Hey Adobe, enough trolling!

[macslas'hole]

Dear Adobe Marketing, enough with the trolling.

Please stop. It's incredibly transparent. It just makes you look stupid.
Bring it or be gone. Ship it or shut up.

1 GB video on 2 GB/mo data plan

[tepples]

Why, when a single alternative format exists, would you encode in such a way that deliberately cuts out 10's of millions of people who have enough money to buy an iOS device

Because iPhone users aren't going to want to stream your 1 GB feature-length video on a 2 GB/mo data plan, and users on Wi-Fi likely have a substantially bigger PC monitor in the same room. Or are you talking about a rental that doesn't doesn't expire, in which one downloads a video on Wi-Fi and watches later?

You could, instead, encode to H.264 / AVC, and serve that up natively to the devices that support it, and then wrap that same H.264 content in Flash for devices that need Flash to play H.264.

Then what do you do for devices that report no AVC support and Gnash instead of Flash Player?

It just makes no sense, when there is no compelling benefit to switch to WebM for any online/streaming use - it's already royalty free for them

This is true, as I understand it, if your videos are ad-supported or otherwise free as in beer. But if you're charging for an AVC stream or download, you have to pay MPEG-LA a cut of your related revenue, and I'd guess revenue from WebM is probably not "related".

Until WebM has stood up to a patent challenge or two or three, I wouldn't expect anybody beyond Google to seriously consider adopting it

Fraunhofer/Thomson's posturing about MP3 technology that might be in Vorbis hasn't stopped PC video game developers from adopting Vorbis in droves.

It's even worse

[Anonymous Coward]

I find that some Flash games already slow down noticeably when the bullets start flying, even on a 2GHz Core Duo with an nVidia card.

#WP7 not a smartphone or somethin'?!

[ClippyHater]

How 'bout some flash lovin' for Windows Phone 7. It's like I bought an iOS device or something!!

Adobe Says..

[Anonymous Coward]

"Adobe said on Monday that it predicts 600% growth in the number of smartphones having the Flash 10.1 Player"

It must be true if adobe says it..

Oh wait -- whos the owner of flash again?

Adobe Mud

[Anonymous Coward]

Yet there is still no content worth viewing with Flash. It's all glitz and advertising. Ding.

Not all non-free OSes include AVC decoder either

[tepples]

Forget the "Free Operating System" for a sec. 99% of people use a non-free operating system. Should we forget streamlining for those people because a few FOSS people don't like the idea?

Windows XP Home Edition, Windows XP Professional, Windows Vista Home Basic, Windows Vista Business, and Windows 7 Starter are proprietary. They lack a built-in AVC decoder just as much as any free operating system does.

!news

[nog_lorp]

Who cares what the W3C says? This doesn't really make any sense. Remember how HTML5 signifies the shift to "Versionless"? The W3C is essentially trying to undermine WhatWG's guidance.

HTML5 is already largely stable and in production use with incredible interoperability.

So the real question is this: what do we do about the W3C now that they are not just impeding progress with their absurdly slow pace or conflated bureaucracy, but are actually engaging in FUD to steal the thunder from people who are actually moving the standards forward!?

Re:!news

[DragonWriter]

Who cares what the W3C says? This doesn't really make any sense. Remember how HTML5 signifies the shift to "Versionless"? The W3C is essentially trying to undermine WhatWG's guidance.

No, W3C is documenting stable standards, and WhatWG is coordinated collaboration on forward looking development. The processes have different needs, but integrate reasonably well together. The WhatWG HTML living standard documents, essentially, features that browser vendors are willing to work toward implementing, the W3C HTML5 standard will document a subset of a point-in-time version of that standard for which interoperable complete implementations actually exist.

Wow

[ThatsNotPudding]

Adobe...predicts 600% growth in the number of smartphones having the Flash 10.1 Player installed in 2011, reaching 132 million smartphones...

That's a shitload of screendoors.

W3C HTML5 standard v. WHATWG HTML Living Standard

[DragonWriter]

3 years is an eternity in web time. By 2014, the web will have evolved once again into something nobody can foresee today.

In three years, the W3C HMTL5 standard will probably document a safe, nearly universally available, baseline standard. It won't document anything interesting or cutting edge, but that's not really the point, that's what the "living standard" for HTML maintained by WHATWG, which "actually now defines the next generation of HTML after HTML5."

Re:Not all non-free OSes include AVC decoder eithe

[BitZtream]

But there are multiple you can install, so whats your actual point? You want everything for free and you want your old OSes to automagically support new things that weren't around when the OS was released?

Why allow disabling LQ?

[pizzach]

Adobe could also stop letting flash authors disable the quality control on the right click menu. I noticed most commercial flash sites would rather you not be able to see their content at all than see it without antialiasing. My main computer is a netbook. It means I just plain can't use the site and must bring my business elsewhere.

If the majority of your audience uses old Windows

[tepples]

But there are multiple you can install

Like which? And don't say VLC media player or ffdshow because those are infringing where I live.

You want everything for free and you want your old OSes to automagically support new things that weren't around when the OS was released?

If the majority of users aren't going to already have an AVC decoder, such as if the majority of users are using Windows pre-7, web site operators have to take that into account when deciding in which format to serve video.

Shame on Flash

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

The Flash based game can be as elegant as "Machinarium" and it can be here today and not something we have to wait for until 2014.

And you can build elegant HTML5 games today, although they'll only run properly on a subset of browsers. But then, Try running Machinarium on your iPhone where there is no Flash support, or on your Android, where Flash is a dog, or on Linux, where Flash is buggy and slow and incomplete, or even on your Mac laptop where Flash is poorly implemented and rarely even uses the graphics card. So you might be wondering, "what's the difference?" Either way you only target a subset of platforms. The difference is, with HTML5 it is an open standard with multiple open and closed source implementations and going forward, nothing stops anyone from building it on their platform. With Flash, we're stuck waiting for Adobe to get off their asses and build better players and while we're at it, we're stuck waiting for them to fix all the security holes. With HTML5 if we don't like an implementation we can switch browsers or phones or OS's in many combinations and all the players are competing to be the best because they want the user base. With Flash it is a one company show and if we don't like the crap Adobe makes we can do nothing but hope people move to HTML5.

No <li value=> in HTML 4.01 Strict

[tepples]

I strongly suggest continuing to work with HTML 4.01 Strict

What is the appropriate, widely implemented counterpart to the value= attribute of the <li> element, which was deprecated in HTML 4.01 and removed from HTML 4.01 Strict? It's one of the few things keeping my HTML 4 projects on the transitional DTD. I imagine that you're likely to recommend CSS counters, but these have two major problems. First, user agents have been slow to implement them. Second, the fact that the first track of Korn's 1998 album Follow the Leader is numbered 13, the fact that Nine Inch Nails' 1992 album Broken has track 6 followed by track 98, the fact that the four freedoms from the Free Software Foundation's definition of free software are customarily numbered with zero-based numbering, and the fact that a top ten list's items are customarily read in descending order are part of the meaning of a document, not the presentation, dammit! Even W3C realized that the element was mistakenly deprecated and restored it in HTML5.

Reasons to optimize an application's memory usage

[tepples]

People still worry about RAM? Unused memory is wasted memory.

Unless your battery-powered computer has two RAM modules and its motherboard can turn off one module when not in use. Or unless your battery-powered computer is RAM-starved to save cost or physical space. Or unless your computer can't take more RAM due to being old (yet paid-for). Or unless your 32-bit operating system can't take more RAM, and you can't switch to the 64-bit version because you depend on a peripheral without a 64-bit driver. Or unless you're going to start an application and don't want to wait for a background application to get swapped out (desktop) or OOM-killed (Android). There are plenty of reasons to optimize an application's memory usage.

H.263 != H.264

[tepples]

For most videos the "reencoding" consisted of moving the H.264 [aka AVC] video out of the Flash container.

Really? I thought Flash had used H.263 (Sorenson Spark) and VP6 before adopting AVC [aka H.264].

Errm, "AVC" is H.264

But H.263 is not H.264. If a video is available only in H.263 and VP6, it would need to be reencoded from source, not just remuxed, to be available in AVC (aka H.264). It's not like converting H.263 to MPEG-4 Part 2 (better known as DivX and Xvid), where the underlying mathematical models are so similar that the conversion is lossless. Or are you claiming that all videos were available in AVC (aka H.264) before YouTube added iPhone support?