HTML5

There’s a lot of debate going on now about HTML5 vs Flash and the future of the mobile web. I thought it might be helpful to shed some light on what HTML5 is about, and why it’s a good thing for the web and mobile technologies.

Others have written more in-depth on this topic, so rather than duplicating that work I’ll hit it briefly and provide links below to some of those other resources if you want to dive deeper.

The primary arguments today around HTML5 and Flash are as follows:

  • Technical Architecture
    • HTML5 renders video in the browser, with no other software required
    • Flash video requires a browser plug-in to be installed – this plug-in is known to sometimes be buggy and prone to crash the browser
  • Mobile Performance
    • The Flash player requires a lot of power to run, which drains the battery in mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, Blackberry, others) and puts an additional load on the processor
  • Authoring Tools
    • If you develop with Flash you have to buy expensive authoring software from Adobe
    • Development in HTML5 requires a simple text editor, which is free for a basic product or low cost for something with more advanced editing features
  • Dependencies
    • If you develop in Flash, you’re counting on Adobe to keep the Flash product current with support for new features found on mobile devices. If Adobe doesn’t keep the Flash development tools current on the new features, you can’t take advantage of them. For Apple, this creates an obvious risk to their platform. They don’t want iPhone or iPad development to be held hostage to another company’s ability (or inability) to deliver quality development tools for those devices.

There’s a lot more to HTML5 than video rendering, but that’s the gist of the debate today around Flash and Apple’s decision to disable it on the iPhone and iPad. Steve Jobs recently published an article called Thoughts on Flash where he goes into detail about Apple’s thinking on this subject. It’s a bit self-serving, of course, but generally I think the points are valid. And apparently a lot of major web operations agree: Apple has posted a list of high-profile sites that are making the conversion from Flash to HTML5 for serving video.

The upshot: HTML5 is the near-future vision of developing for the web, both for mobile devices and traditional desktop use. There are tangible benefits to keeping web standards open and accessible by any device that connects to the web, but especially so now that millions of users are going mobile.

HTML5 Resources

Preview of HTML5 (A List Apart)

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/previewofhtml5

Draft specs by the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group)

http://www.whatwg.org/html5

Dive Into HTML5 – good writeup by Mark Pilgrim, software developer at Google

http://diveintohtml5.org/

HTML5 Tutorial

http://html5tutorial.net/

Posted: May 12th, 2010
Filed under: Apple, Development, Handheld, Mobile Tags: , , | No Comments »

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