Flash-to-HTML5 Translator: Smart But Not Pretty

snydeq writes "Fatal Exception's Neil McAllister takes a first look at Wallaby, Adobe's experimental tool for transforming Flash content into HTML5, and finds the tool an interesting idea with little yet to offer. 'Wallaby engineers have made sound decisions in designing the tool, but what you actually get when you convert a Flash project to HTML5 is extremely limited,' McAllister writes, in large part because many Flash features are not supported, leaving developers to add their own interactivity with jQuery."

Comments

Oh boy!

[Stratoukos]

Oh boy! An article from InfoWorld.

Let me just click the print button and watch the karma pour in.

http://infoworld.com/print/154011

Re:Oh boy!

[Firehed]

Well, in fairness, it's not Adobe's fault that you can't access connected devices (camera, mic, etc.) via HTML5. Yet.

Amazing

[farlukar]

A translator from one top-heavy system to another is not pretty. Who'd have thunk it?

Clean HTML

[sdguero]

FTFA:
"the generated code is clean and concise -- far superior to the Save as HTML feature of Microsoft Word, for example."

Hahaha, not really saying a lot there buddy. My dog can write better HTML than M$ Word.

Re:Works about as well as Google Translate.

[Locke2005]

Great idea, I'll just fire up one of the many widely used and well supported HTML5 authoring applications...
Oh wait...

Re:Does it support Homestar Runner?

[organgtool]

Homestar is pretty much the only type of content that you really need flash for. For everything else, it should be completely avoided.

Thank you for saving me the trouble of determining what I should be viewing. There may be a position opening up for you in the future as CEO of a large company in Cupertino.

Perhaps germaine to the conversation

[iluvcapra]

There is also an open source Flash runtime called "Gordon" that reads the SWF and executes the animation and events in a <canvas> element.

HTML5 readiness as a Flash replacement

[shutdown -p now]

Aside from all the unsupported features, what's interesting is the number of broken things that Adobe claims, at least, to be due to browser bugs. E.g.:

"There is a known Webkit issue with complex timeline animations that crashes all Webkit browsers. This seems to increase in frequency with complex animations and on slower devices."

"Prior [to 4.2] iOS versions have known masking issues with Wallaby generated HTML files."

"Zooming in and out can cause odd artifacts in the browser. This is a bug in the browser."

"Masked artwork sometimes displays a faint border around the masked area. This is a bug in the browser."

"[in Safari] A few known animation issues with 'static' content dropping."

also some of the things that they have supported, were implemented by browser-specific means:

"The only supported Webkit browsers at this time are Chrome and Safari on OSX, Windows, and iOS (iPad, iPhone, iPod). Because Wallaby uses Webkit specific animation primitives, animation will not work and has not been tested on other browsers."

So, um... what about HTML5 as the purported Flash replacement, then, if a good chunk of functionality is simply not there or is browser-specific, and even of the stuff that is supposed to work, a lot does not in current browsers, because, apparently, no-one had actually tried it with the level of complexity common for Flash apps?

Re:HTML5 readiness as a Flash replacement

[Pieroxy]

What's your point? Flash is old ans HTML5 is young? Was it really necessary to write a 11 line post to make your point?

Re:HTML5 readiness as a Flash replacement

[shutdown -p now]

Every time the issue of Flash vs HTML5 comes up on Slashdot, there is a slew of upmodded posts explaining how Flash is already not relevant and should be discovered, and how HTML5 can fully replace any legitimate use of Flash. I'm pointing out that this doesn't seem to be the case.

Re:HTML5 readiness as a Flash replacement

[olau]

Every time the issue of Flash vs HTML5 comes up on Slashdot, there is a slew of upmodded posts explaining how Flash is already not relevant and should be discovered, and how HTML5 can fully replace any legitimate use of Flash. I'm pointing out that this doesn't seem to be the case.

I think it's optimism mostly. A lot of people hate Flash for various reasons, many of them perhaps having to do with its perceived lack of stability, at least on Linux. So naturally people are just waiting for the moment where they can drop Flash without missing out. I'm in that category. :)

But I'm totally with you on readiness - I made an animation example last year, and the conclusion then was that you can't have big images moving in HTML without occasional flickering in any of the browsers I tried, and that included IE, Opera, Safari, Chrome and Firefox (some tested both on Linux and in Windows).

It's a good thing that Adobe has started the process, because it can push the browser developers to actually fix the issues.

Re:HTML5 for Video versus HTML5 for interactivity

[Anthony Mouse]

The converter was probably gimped on purpose so people stick with Flash.

Maybe, but I don't really see the point of that. They probably just haven't spent enough time polishing it yet.

Adobe wants to promote Flash so that people will buy Flash Creator. But the output format is irrelevant to them. If people want HTML5, it's in their interest to make Creator output HTML5 -- because all they care is that people are buying Creator.