Flash, Silverlight just Stop-Gaps

jacobl — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 13:31:01 GMT

The F.U.D.

There has been a lot of talk in the past few weeks about HTML 5 and its supposed takeover on the web (or lack thereof). It's only a matter of time before Flash and Silverlight become less relevant. The CEO of Adobe, Shantanu Narayen, defended their position in the future of the web during the company's last quarterly financial call, saying:

So [, we're] clearly supportive in terms of making sure as HTML 5 is evolving that we will support it in our web authoring tools but from the perspective of continuing to drive Flash and innovation around Flash and rich Internet applications, we still think that actually the fragmentation of browsers makes Flash even more important rather than less important.

The part of the question that he is dodging here is how a more powerful and more broadly supported standard will affect Flash in the long term.

Recently, InfoWorld posted an article about this very topic. It's a good read and the author gets a lot of things right. He talks about how IE will be a critical milestone for HTML 5 to overcome:

The exception is Microsoft, which therefore is in a difficult situation, says Almaer. The company has heavy investments in trying to propel Silverlight to dominance. "That's a big elephant in the room for them because you can imagine the Silverlight team [whose] whole existence is to add [this] functionality in. [But] if Internet Explorer puts it already in there, why do we have Silverlight?" he asks.

Good question. What incentive does Microsoft have, from a Silverlight perspective, to further the advancement of HTML 5? When IE adds support for all of the capabilities that Silverlight has to offer directly into the browser, does Silverlight still need to exist? No, it doesn't. It's arguably in Microsoft's best interest to keep its feet stuck in the mud and continue to not be a 'standards-based' browser.

The Push

This roadblock is ever more apparent with the announcement of Firefox 3.5 RC. It, along with Safari and Chrome, already support much of what HTML 5 has coming up in the pipeline. Internet Explorer is the only major player that is mum on the subject.

Fortunately, the push for more advanced capabilities in the HTML standard is so great that some of IE's shortcomings can be sidestepped. There is a project put together by Google on SourceForge called ExplorerCanvas. It allows for 2D command-based drawing. Browsers like Safari, Firefox, Chrome and Opera all support the HTML5 canvas... but Internet Explorer does not. The ExplorerCanvas project overcomes this by taking Microsoft's Vector Markup Language and wrapping it in JavaScript to create the desired effect. The DotImage Web Annotation Viewer that we use in our SharePoint Document Viewer, VizitSP, employs the ExplorerCanvas to let users author annotations in a very natural way.

Another example of this push is Kroc Camen's recent publication of Video for Everyone. By using the upcoming <video> tag along with Flash and Quicktime object tags, he is able to provide a series of fallbacks that can offer HTML5 love to people who deserve it while providing an acceptable experience for those who don't.

One area where I think InfoWorld gets it wrong is in its comment about Google's possible apprehension toward pushing the new standard:

..its YouTube subsidiary uses Flash for its video, but the inclusion of HTML 5 capabilities in browsers might cause YouTube to rethink that decision, notes Fette. "It's a cost/benefit analysis that they'd need to make."

For a couple months now, YouTube has had an HTML 5 demo available on its site. The example shows that, with a capable browser, you can view video without any codecs or plugins. It just works. YouTube has clearly already begun to invest the time into moving away from Flash as soon as it's feasible. Without much effort, YouTube could begin serving up HTML5 video to those browsers that support it. To push the envelope even further, YouTube could add features to the HTML5 version that are either not possible to do in Flash or just as an incentive to get people to use better browsers... or to give IE a hint.

The Point

The point here is that we can't allow such a fundamental piece to the future of the Internet rely on plugins. Something that is so core to the direction that the web is vectored toward deserves to be treated as such: core. While it might take us a while to get there, we will --even if it means dragging the old browsers kicking and screaming behind us. Until then, Flash and Silverlight can rule the roost.

Jake Opines : JavaScript, HTML5

Flash, Silverlight just Stop-Gaps