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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."
... 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.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
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...
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
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.
Even better, how about a lightweight browser that doesn't require plugins to view videos?
So, just to clarify for all you people who haven't realized yet, there are two different groups working on HTML at the moment.
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.)
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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.
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.
-Woof woof woof!
A browser with built-in support for the thousands of different codecs AND lightweight (less than 100 MB)? Impossible.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
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.
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.
Information wants to be expensive AND wants to be free. So you have Value vs. Cheap distribution fighting each other.
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.
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/
"Lame" - Galaxar
No, it's not related to DRM at all
From http://www.longtailvideo.com/support/blog/11887/html5-video-not-quite-there-yet
The problem with slashdot is that most of its users were bullied and stuffed into lockers as kids!
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.
"I'm never quite so stupid as when I'm being smart" (Linus van Pelt)
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.
The ______ Agenda
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
It's always confirmation bias!
> 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.
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.
You're special forces then? That's great! I just love your olympics!
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.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
That's a shitload of screendoors.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Linux can't do anything about it. It's not a technical problem, it's a legal one.
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This is what happens when people try to replace emacs.
But i *need* tetris in my text-editor.