If you’ve been reading any of the grade 7 back and forth between Adobe and Apple, you’ve no doubt encountered the chatter about HTML5. Claimed by many to be the key to elevating the web to the “next level,” HTML5 has both supporters and detractors. There are many who believe that Flash is just fine, thank you.
My own experience with Flash goes back more than a decade to the last century. Originally, we used Flash to create short little animations that could be populated on a CD-ROM (What’s that?) or a web page. As the application evolved, we began to create more complex animations and complete websites. But that was then… A Flash driven website today is not what we’d propose to anyone. While the argument that Flash sites are “pretty” only relates to the lack of elements that load, it’s a total pain from a search engine optimization point of view, and I can easily state that memory leaks and other issues make it a royal pain from a website point of view. In fact, even animations must be carefully constructed, or memory and other errors will occur. Yes, that is an engineering issue, but it’s also a technology issue.
HTML5 is gaining momentum in a wide arena. Apple offers a neat HTML5 showcase. Of greater interest (to me and many of our readers), is the HTML5 demo site created by Hakim El Hattab. On his site, there are a wealth of neat experiments that highlight the remarkable power of HTML5. Flash was successful because it offered a “seamless” approach according to Hakim. HTML5 will change that, by bringing the most important building blocks to the “open” web. Check out the site and you’ll get an opportunity to evaluate the power of HTML5 for yourself. It won’t end the Flash debate, but it shows how useful and potentially exciting HTML5 is.