HTML 5 As a Viable Alternative To Flash? 541
superglaze writes "Jon von Tetzchner, Opera's CEO, has claimed that the open standards in HTML 5 will make it unnecessary to deliver rich media content using the proprietary Flash. '"You can do most things with web standards today," von Tetzchner said. "In some ways, you may say you don't need Flash." Von Tetzchner added that his comments were not about "killing" Flash. "I like Adobe — they're a nice company," he said. "I think Flash will be around for a very, very long time, but I think it's natural that web standards also evolve to be richer. You can then choose whether you'd like [to deliver rich media content] through web standards or whether you'd like to use Flash."'"
"A nice company"? (Score:4, Informative)
"I like Adobe â" they're a nice company,"
Has he actually used any of their stuff? Apparently not. Also, according to my friend who works in a Flash coding shop, they can real pricks occassionally.
WARNING (Score:0, Informative)
Re:Vectors? (Score:1, Informative)
SVG
Re:My Kingdom for a Datagrid Element! (Score:5, Informative)
When was the last time I didn't use a table tag on a page? Uh, today... the day before that, and before that.
I use tables rarely and only for displaying data, never for formatting a page. I stopped using tables for design years ago, that's why we have CSS.
I think its time for you to stop using tables for design. Tables lock your user into your content via your specific design. Flexibility and accessibility requires properly formatted CSS with divs and spans, knowing how to use floats and relative positioning.
But yes, datagrid element will be great.
JavaFX (Score:5, Informative)
JavaFX may be trailing Flash and Silverlight, but it's the only RIA framework that has a snowball's chance in hell of being open sourced.
It supports charting, animations, and rich media. Version 1.5 is rumoured to have support for complex form controls, just like Flex.
What's more, it's totally integrated into the Java Virtual Machine, meaning it can use all of the Java class libraries. It even has a mobile component, meaning it's possible to port applications between the desktop and supporting mobile platforms.
To me, this single runtime sounds like a much better alternative that the kludge that is HTML/CSS/JavaScript/AJAX support a multitude of IE6/IE7/IE8/Firefox/Safari/Chrome/Opera browser runtimes, especially if there's no framework behind them.
Re:Options (Score:5, Informative)
Except for the music controls, just about everything on that page can be done with current HTML/CSS/JS now.
Re:My Kingdom for a Datagrid Element! (Score:5, Informative)
TABLES have nasty cross-browser issues when combined with CSS, and it's ridiculous to program without CSS for formatting. I recently had to return to my old table-layout ways for an HTML newsletter (HTML mails have to be done the old fashioned way because CSS support in mail programs and webmails is 'less than stellar') and experienced long lost pain and anguish from it.
I used to do real complex layouts with tables, graph paper and a simple text editor (even before Photoshop sliced images for table layouts) and I'm glad I have CSS now. The only exception would be using a table with a single cell for vertical alignment now and then, but that's just a small hack. Everything else can be done simpler with CSS.
As for the main topic, I say: not yet... I'm all for replacing Flash with DHTML and do so every chance I get... but it's still to slow and jerky compared with flash animation for smooth scrolling and fx.
Re:In MOST ways you don't need Flash (Score:2, Informative)
I can't tell you how many times I've come across a site which uses Flash to show a single, individual picture.
Most of the time I've seen this done it's to prevent casual downloading of the picture. If you put the image up in straight HTML, anyone can Right Click->Save Image As. If you embed it in a Flash object, it's much harder to grab the image.
Unless HTML 5 has a way to prevent casual copying, that usage is not going away.
Re:In MOST ways you don't need Flash (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Vectors? (Score:3, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canvas_(HTML_element) [wikipedia.org]
SVG, an open vector graphics standard, is part of HTML5.
Re:"good" thing about flash is you can shut it off (Score:5, Informative)
Why? You can already disable blink, javascript, images and many more "standard" elements.
Re:My Kingdom for a Datagrid Element! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Options (Score:3, Informative)
That is nothing. Like everyone else said, you can do everything except the music control without HTML5 (though 5 might make it easier).
If you want to see what HTML5 can do, look at this:
http://www.w3.org/2009/03/web-demo.xhtml [w3.org]
and this:
http://standblog.org/blog/post/2009/04/15/Making-video-a-first-class-citizen-of-the-Web [standblog.org]
Admittedly, these are not exactly real-world use cases, but they do show the potential.
Re:"A nice company"? (Score:5, Informative)
Corporate intranet (Score:4, Informative)
You don't have to support IE?
Corporate intranet. The organization is 80% Firefox, 10% Chrome, and 10% Mobile Safari.
Re:My Kingdom for a Datagrid Element! (Score:3, Informative)
http://reference.sitepoint.com/css/vertical-align [sitepoint.com]
IE 5.5+ supports middle, but both IE and Firefox have trouble with anything but top, bottom, and middle.
Elisp CMS? (Score:3, Informative)
he does have to hand code his pages using emacs.
You just think he's hand-coding his pages. He's really using a website revision system (what's that? [gnu.org]) written partly in Emacs Lisp.
Re:My Kingdom for a Datagrid Element! (Score:3, Informative)
Thing is, a lot of slashdotters have the "luxury" of ignoring this fact. I cut my web app teeth working for a public university, so this stuff has been seriously ingrained into our policies. We still have a ton of legacy stuff to bring into the 21st century, but I don't know of a shop on campus that thinks tables are an okay way to do layout. And when you do use them, you use them with properly scoped <th>s, etc.
I wish more people did work for the government or maybe accessibility-related NGOs. It was a good way to go - learn how to do it the "hard" way, and the "easy" way looks awful.
Re:My Kingdom for a Datagrid Element! (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Does not work (Score:5, Informative)
You obviously haven't tried this...
vertical-align: middle; only works like you think it does along with display: table-cell, but in some browsers it breaks horribly.
For table cells it specifies vertical centering. For inline elements it specifies how to align them relative to the baseline of the containing text. For block elements it does nothing.
http://phrogz.net/CSS/vertical-align/index.html [phrogz.net]
margin: auto 0 has zero effect because of margin collapsing.
http://www.researchkitchen.de/blog/archives/css-autoheight-and-margincollapsing.php [researchkitchen.de]
Re:My Kingdom for a Datagrid Element! (Score:2, Informative)
Re:My Kingdom for a Datagrid Element! (Score:3, Informative)
Goto's are a tool. They just happen to be a tool that has greater potential for misuse than most other control structures in programming. So if you know what you're doing, it's fine to use it. But most people don't know what they're doing, so goto's have become generally frowned upon. And justifiably so, because that greater potential for abuse is really greater. Goto's in compiled code (or if you're actually writing in assembler) are fine because compilers (or people who write in assembler), pretty much always know what they're doing. But the further from the metal you climb, the less this is true. No-one wants to debug code riddled with goto's and seldom is code in C or more modern languages well structured if it's written with goto's.
So maybe you don't get the "goto's" are bad because you really know what you're doing and see it as just a tool to be used correctly. Try thinking about lots of people using the tool badly, and you'll get it.
Re:Screen Reader Issues are Overblown. (Score:2, Informative)
Yup. The screen reader I use has had an option called "ignore layout tables" since 1995. It also allows me to ignore iframes (do you realize how many ads I miss, that way? Hardly need adblock!), flash, and various other tags and atributes, at my whim. It can even skip repeated text, in order to take me right to the page content; when I click a link on a page, it compares the new page with the old one, and places the cursor after any text that is the same on both pages. Works well to skip menus and other crap.