The Future of HTML 5 | Hacker News Reader

The Future of HTML 5

carsonified.com

21 pointsfogus7 comments

Without solidarity of video format across browsers, Flash will still hold the embedded video market in browsers. Not to mention like all the other open standards, until Microsoft works out a way to get users to their most current browsers AND makes them fully HTML5 compatible, Flash (and Silverlight) will have a non-replaceable happy home in a majority of the browsers.

I don't see solidarity of video format coming. People with deep pockets are uncomfortable with the Ogg family and the unknown risks of litigation. People who do not wish to open their pockets won't license the MPEG portfolio.

My solution: The MPEG group should license their portfolio for free for HTML5 browsers. That will cement them as "the" format and they can recover their research costs and make their profit on licenses for devices and nonbrowser software.

(Thought I can only imagine how many lawyer hours it will take to arrive at a suitable definition of an "HTML5 browser".)

The MPEG group should license their portfolio for free for HTML5 browsers. That will cement them as "the" format

This is akin to the faux pas of asking someone to work for free because it would look good on their resume or in their portfolio. It would only be plausible if h.264 weren't already very successful.

Hello HTML...& goodbye Flash?

"HTML5 is expected to be a game-changer in Web application development, making obsolete such plug-in-based rich Internet application (RIA) technologies as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Sun JavaFX..." [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML_5]

Please let it be so..

I wouldn't plan on saying Goodbye anytime soon. Right now about 20% of users still use a browser that's 8 years old. So if we add that to the roughly 2 or so years it will take for the HTML 5 standard to be finalized and implemented in browsers you're looking at about a decade or more before we have a widespread HTML 5 user base.

There is one potential savior and ironically its a plug in. Namely Chrome Frame. If Google continues to update it and aggresively push it we might see HTML 5 use much earlier. But that still depends on the success of Chrome Frame eclipsing that of Flash.

Otherwise Flash is still the most widespread solution for RIA based pages and will be for a long time to come.

This was one of the best talks at the Future of Web Apps. Well worth a watch.

I found the HTML5 forms demos much more interesting than the canvas (Flash killer) demos.

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