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SlideShare Ditches Flash, Rebuilds Site In HTML5
Frankie70 writes "SlideShare has ditched Adobe Flash technology entirely, and rebuilt its website using the HTML5 markup language. This means that SlideShare is now viewable on every kind of mobile device, from iPads to iPhones to Android devices and beyond."
1) Who the hell are SlideShare?
2) Why would I care?
3) What makes it frontpage material for nerds?
Why? For no good reason then to annoy us I guess.
What are the downsides or issues involved in building a general purpose html5 website today, for public consumption?
I'm not talking about a site which will use the canvas tag etc but something that should work fine on older browsers - how do older browsers react to doctypes developed after the browser was created?
I was looking at doing this for an upcoming project, specifically to use data annotations on tags (if you look at Facebook, they use non-standard data annotations on tags) but haven't come to a decision yet, as it hinges on what older browsers do.
Wake me up when youtube ditches Flash.
SlideShare is now viewable on every kind of mobile device
As long as they support that very flavor of HTML5 which, in turn, is still a draft!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
When I go to the site, I'm still getting "Flash Player 9 (or above) is needed to view presentations."
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
This is good news. No need to use Flash for presenting what is basically static pages with perhaps an animation here and there. Using HTML will make it more accessible. They mention mobile devices, but this will also help search engines and people with disabilities.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Have they ditched flash for their main general website? No. The only reason they don't use it for apple devices is they had no choice. Thats entirely different to making a voluntary decision to bin it completely. I don't think its me that needs to wake up to reality.
Go look at the code for their demo on their front page. There's not one single big of "HTML 5" in it. It's just HTML 4 and Javascript.
Please stop perpetuating the myth that HTML 5 is actually useable or presently wide spread technology!
Hyper Text Markup Language 5 Markup Language! Yeah!
Excuse me, I need to go order me some of that RAM memory stuff.
They're still using it on their main site. If you have some insider information that they're going to get rid of flash fairly soon , please , fill us in!
I can post "Ding Dong the witch is dead. Which old witch? The proprietary cpu eating battery draining witch!"
Sooner or later anyway...
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
Well, I just signed up (yay slashvertisement!) and uploaded a very simple powerpoint slide.
Result: Running chrome I still see the slide being run on Flash. I have looked around and found no immediate way of activating the HTML5 mode, even if I can see the HTML5 presentations in the slideshare frontpage just fine.
Maybe it runs on flash only if it detects a flash plugin, but why tout the HTML5 mode this way if they are going to default to flash anyway?
Users lost with a game that consumes 200% more CPU than it would need because the developer was too lazy to code it in the native language.
In the language of which device?
Say I'm trying to develop an application and make it available for two different devices. I already know I have to code separate front-ends for the two devices to fit into their respective user interface paradigms, but ideally the domain logic should be shared among all platforms. For example, a game's domain logic would include its physics and NPC behaviors. This concept has been called I/O abstraction, model-view-controller, or multitier. Now say one device runs only Objective-C and standard C++ (plus JavaScript in its web browser) and another runs only C#, F#, VB.NET, and other verifiably type-safe languages (plus JavaScript in its web browser). In such a case, in what language do I code the domain logic?
It was the top app for 3 days in a row and it is probably already fading into oblivion.
Be careful with that word, or you might end up on the business end of a lawsuit from Bethesda :p
I use it for research purposes and the installation of flash was inevitable. I can fortunately soon view SlideShare presentations without this piece of proprietary code.
So you want to serve the same content to all UA's on all devices?
In general, the best practice is to separate content (HTML), behavior (JavaScript), and presentation (CSS). Some people take this too far and try to abstract all differences among platforms with changes to behavior and presentation. For example, a web site might think it enhances usability to show only a headline to a class of physically small devices while showing the abstract of each front-page article to a class of full-size device. Separation weenies think hiding the abstract with CSS enough, but there's a good reason to redirect full-size UAs to example.com/home and mobile UAs to example.com/m by default: mobile UAs tend to be behind much slower connections.
[Early HTTP drafts] clearly state that it was meant purely "for statistical purposes and the tracing of protocol violations." Neither of those advocate, nor even suggest, that the response should be modified depending on the header value.
Then why did HTTP never include a header expressing whether the user wants short or long versions of a particular document?
When used properly, the exact same content should render perfectly fine on all sorts of devices with a wide range of capabilities and display media.
It should render perfectly fine, but it doesn't download perfectly fine. Say you have an index page of a web site with a list of headlines and abstracts of news articles. On a mobile device, you want to render only the headlines so that they all fit above the fold. You could use a style sheet to hide the abstracts, but because you're sending the same document, the user still has to download the abstract, and users pay for such downloads in both time (slow connections) and money (overages on capped plans).
Furthermore, you have clearly misunderstood the purpose of the WWW. It's a system for delivering documents that can link to one another.
Does "document" refer to an entire article or to a section of an article with links to other sections? On large screens and fast connections, the user is likely to want the former. On small screens and slow connections, the user is likely to want the latter.
I have websites that work fine for years serving a smaller Logo to iPhones because, you know, they're slower devices with smaller screens.
This logo is an image document, and you want to send a low-detail and high-detail version. The content/style separation weenies would want you to A. send it in a vector format that looks good at any size or B. send a raster image using the progressive JPEG or interlaced PNG such that the device can terminate the download after the next pass would exceed the device's resolution. Should the user want to zoom in on the document, the user agent would then resume the download using an HTTP range request.
Shouldn't this read, "replaced Flash with HTML Canvas"?
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
That I tested Firefox 3.6.22 (I refuse to use the newer versions since they mess with Java processes.) and that scored 179/450 on the HTML5 test.
Then I tried IE 8. That got a dismal 69/450
Trying Google Chrome v15.0.874.51 beta-m yields a 328/450.
So if two of the three browsers are up to current version and the highest score is 328/450 then how the hell do they expect people to be able to visit HTML5 sites reliably?
The ads on SlideShare are still using Flash, so I think 'entirely' isn't quite the right. Apparently they're not willing to give up ad revenue to be entirely Flash free.
You might even choose to put less information on every page and break down your site into more smaller pages. Try to do that with JavaScript or CSS.
Have you ever seen a shebang (#!) in URLs on, say, Twitter or any Gawker Media site? That symbolizes an AJAX site. AJAX sites load the HTML page and a script, and then the script decides what information to pull from the server. It could make that decision by sniffing the window width and height, converting that to ems, and using that to estimate what level of detail will fit above the fold.
I agree that CSS isn't a complete solution. For example, if you try to use display:none to make a document show more detail (e.g. headlines and abstracts) or less detail (e.g. headlines only), you end up wasting your bandwidth and that of the user by sending a bunch of text that won't get displayed on the device where you show less detail.
The html5 video tag has provisions for sites to supply multiple formats and allow the browser to select the compatible one.
But does the HTML5 video tag provide for sites to supply multiple sizes of one format, such as 1080p, 720p, 480p, 360p, or 240p, based on the available bandwidth, processing power, and screen resolution? For a handheld device with a small screen and a slow, capped Internet connection, you might want to provide the low-detail version of a video.
RAS syndrome is for disambiguation.
if they actually used html5
as it stands all they've using is normal html4 and javascript plugins to do slide show effects
Does it need to be called Hypertext Markup Language Markup Language these days? I LOL out loud.