The Flash versus Html 5 debate has been a hot topic among Web Developers for years now and this year might see the winner as predicted by Steve Jobs in 2010. Flash may finally pave for Html 5 which has been largely touted as the future.
In June 2010 at the D8 conference, Jobs elaborated on why the iPad and iPhone would never support Adobe’s Flash.
“But sometimes you have to pick the things that look like the right horses to ride going forward. And Flash looks like a technology that had its day, but is waning. And HTML5 looks like the technology that is on the ascendancy now.”
4 years on the time might have arrived for those words to become the reality. Online multimedia content management might now shift base from Flash to HTML 5.
Since its introduction the languages major advantage is said to be the mobile market which is on a boom, due the ever increasing usage of smartphones. This has sidelined Adobe Flash to only PC’s ,siting its inability to play online audio and video files on the handsets.
For online video, HTML 5 offers two things Flash does not: mobile capabilities and semantic markup. The amazing speed of HTML 5 based apps and its support for search engine optimization may have been the reason for the developers to take this plunge.
In addition to that, developers are now focusing on HTML 5 based games, as they can run 10 times faster than Flash games.Though mobile is the most obvious advantage there lies another feature in the semantic structure that is powerful especially for Interactive Videos.With the semantic structure of Interactive Video, one can build projects using HTML 5 that have multiple interrelated pieces that Web crawlers know how to understand. But with Flash, we get a black box that, when crawled, shows up as just a Flash video without any extra information.
Though we can’t expect Flash to bow out any time soon, since it still remains the standard for web videos among the desktop users, we might as well say that it is now time for HTML 5 to shine.