It’s official, Adobe Systems, the maker of Flash, have given up developing new versions for mobile phones in favour of HTML 5.
The late Steve Jobs was probably the strongest opponent of Flash, especially on the iPhone and iPad. Although he had a long list of reasons, including to dislike Adobe for not developing software for Mac in the past, the chief reasoning upheld by many was that it uses too much processing and battery power.
Will we miss Flash?
Here at freshSPRING we’ve never really been big fans of Flash because although it could make very pretty and funky sites it is hard for a client to edit without understanding vector graphics and having editing packages, is comparatively expensive to develop and is hard for Search Engines to read and hence causes problems for Search Engine Optimisation.
YouTube have been using Flash since the early days, however they did (out of necessity) convert most of their content to another format (H.264 to be precise), specifically to display on Apple’s iOS format. Doubtless Adobe’s announcement will accelerate the final conversion and as soon as a sufficient percentage of people have browsers that support HTML5 then expect to see a wholesale change. Advertising is likely to change too, especially those rather annoying pop-out adverts, being HTML5-driven though cool transitions and ‘effects’ still currently require Flash.
Now we should add that Flash will continue to exist on the desktop and probably for some time as so many simple applications are made using Flash. Perhaps most importantly there are a lot of online games built almost exclusively using Flash, not to mention the way videos are displayed.
What is HTML 5?
You could be forgiven for thinking it will completely change the web – much like ‘Web 2.0′ and ‘Web 3.0′, however you define those rather loose concepts. It won’t, but it will have a significant impact on the larger sites that can afford to recode, migrate and take full advantage of what you can do with HTML 5.
In simple terms (aside from being successor to HTML 4) it is the layout language that every website outputs to allow a page to be structured. It works with a style file that says what colour, size, etc each bit should be. HTML 5 is much more flexible than before, allowing more movement and to just say “put video or audio here” and it will work, due to using a standard format, no need to load a plugin. Even simpler, it allows cool stuff to happen, including web apps like Google Docs.
If you check out Wikipedia you can get the geeky HTML5 answer, this infographic from Forum is really helpful (and easier to read) but if you really want to ‘get it’ just have a look at some of the great examples at Apple and HTML5 Gallery.
