Whether your computer is showing colorful fish floating in an aquarium, bouncing balls, or a mouse pointer that takes on the form of a paintbrush, it’s probably thanks to Flash technology.
But soon, many of these same features could be delivered by HTML5, an up-and-coming web standard. That would mean freedom from Adobe and its Flash Player plug-in. But will this new technology spell the end of Flash. Experts say — maybe.
The recent decision by Apple boss Steve Jobs to pick HTML5 over Flash has caused the debate to perk up again. But at the end of the day, both technologies have their advantages — and their limitations.
“HTML5 attempts to bring applications directly into the browser,” says Phoenix, Arizona-based web developer Stephanie Sullivan Rewis. That makes it significantly easier to design web applications.
At the same time, she told the German Press Agency dpa she can’t imagine that Flash will become irrelevant. “The W3C is absolutely not interested in integrating all of Flash’s possibilities into the standard.”
The W3C is short for the World Wide Web Consortium, the guarantor of web standards. Directed by Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee, the W3C invested a lot of energy into developing HTML 4.01 and XHTML1.1, the two current valid standards.
But, in October 2009, the W3C opted to put the more rigid XHTML standard on ice and direct its energies toward HTML5.
For all that, the new features are relatively basic. There are fewer than 30 new tags — computer code items listed in brackets that define the role of individual elements of a Web site, like a single paragraph. It’s mostly about expansions of the “semantic web,” getting elements named so their name implies what they do.
Using a blog entry as an example, the updates become obvious. Currently, the various parts of the blog are split into elements…