HTML5 present a serious challenge to Adobe's
own Flash rich Internet plug-in technology.Since Adobe's Flash has been used to
present videos and multimedia on the Web. With HTML5, developers can use the
open JavaScript language, cascading style sheets (CSS), and of course HTML to
build applications. The HTML5 "family" features a set of specifications that
also includes CSS3, Canvas 2D tags, and WebSockets, for interbrowser
communications.HTML5 reduces the need for external plugins (like Flash).
Paul Trani, an Adobe developer evangelist says that the company is developing
Adobe Edge, a tool for creating animated content using Web standards.Edge uses
HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Adobe also backs HTML5 capabilities in its
Dreamweaver, Fireworks, and Illustrator tools. Additionally, Adobe's PhoneGap
and PhoneGap Build enable building of cross-platform mobile applications with
HTML5 and JavaScript.
Adobe is even hiring people to work on Web standards projects and is considering
offering tools to convert ActionScript to JavaScript. Adobe's Wallaby project,
meanwhile, is about converting artwork contained in Flash Professional files to
HTML.
One developer praises Adobe's embrace of HTML5. "With SEO [search engine
optimization], Flash has always caused problems for websites," says Shar Marachi,
he said "If there's certain content in that Flash element, the search engines
don't pick it up."
Another developer who has worked with Flash understands Adobe's response to
HTML5. "While a lot of their stuff has to do with Flash, that's not where they
make their money. They make their money selling tools," says Alan Gruskoff, a
developer at Digital Showcase, which does mobile and rich Internet application
design. "They give away Flash."
Adobe pushes CSS improvements for HTML5
Adobe has proposed its CSS regions and CSS shaders as standards for adoption by
the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which oversees HTML5 and CSS.
Trani says,"CSS regions lets you reflow content, and shaders basically take any
sort of Web standards content and make it appear as bitmapped data, so you can
manipulate it," and "Shaders are useful in the context of animated transitions
and complement specifications such as CSS animations, CSS transitions, and SVG
animations".
Flash still has support
Despite Adobe's HTML5 strategy, Flash is not going away, argues the developer
Ruskoff: "Any of the fanboys that say, 'Flash is dead, HTML5 rules,' you know
they're speaking without knowledge of the real world." HTML5, he notes, has not
even been ratified, despite its adoption in draft form in every major desktop
and mobile browser.
JavaScript represents the biggest gap in the HTML5 realm, says Tom Bray, a
developer at Ace Metrics, which offers an on-demand Adobe Flex-based application
for advertisers to gauge effectiveness of TV ads. That's why he prefers using
Flash: "[Flash's] ActionScript is a beautiful language, based on the same
standard as JavaScript ... ActionScript 3 is much more mature object-oriented
programming language, and that is the one thing that enterprise developers who
love Flex really want to see survive."
Adobe's Trani also cites a niche for Flash, such as 3D capabilities and game
developme