I kept reading on Giz about how HTML 5 takeover is imminent and each time lost a little respect for my favourite gadget blog. It's good to know that when it comes down to it some of them do actually know what they're talking about.

Gizmodo, who were some of the idiots I referred to in my post yesterday redeemed themselves by publishing a very comprehensive breakdown of why HTML 5 isn't saving anyone anytime soon 40 minutes ago, and (although they only briefly touched on it, being that the post is primarily about HTML 5) why Flash is better at doing the kind of things HTML 5 is supposed to usurp in imagination land.

HTML isn't platform ubiquitous and never will be because whoever has the monopoly is also directly motivated to keep web standards to shit. Companies are companies and the monopoly will always be a company.

Flash on the other hand is already platform ubiquitous. Write once, deploy everywhere. The only problem with flash is resource use, which 10.1 - already in 2nd beta will address.

Flash also now has the ability to run native c/c++ code, so decoding video with flash will be as fast as doing it natively in the browser. Well as doing it natively in the browser will eventually maybe possibly in 5-10 years if the web can come together in happy fairy land on HTML 5 implementation.

Goodbye Flash?? I say goodbye web browsers and hello Adobe AIR branded front ends to web services and content.

Here's a small excerpt from John Herrman of Gizmodo's comprehensive HTML 5 breakdown, although I strongly recommend you read the whole thing as it makes things clear for the tech - and not so tech, savvy:

...

The Basics

Before we get into what HTML5 means, we have to talk about what it is, and to talk about what it is, we need to talk about what it's built upon.

Hypertext markup language, or HTML, is the language underneath every web page you've ever been to. The language, along with its various complementary technologies (see: CSS, Javascript), has become immensely complex over the years, but the concept is simple. HTML is what turns this:

<u><em><strong><a href="http://gizmodo.com">Hello!</a></strong></em></u>

Into this:

Hello!

It's basically a set of instructions that a website hands to a browser, which the browser then reads and converts into a formatted page, full of text, images, links and whatever else.

Here, try this: Right-click anywhere on this webpage, and click "View Page Source," or "View Source," or something to that effect. Your eyes will be assaulted with a wall of inscrutable text. You'll see evidence of syntax, but your brain won't be able to parse it. Your eyes will glaze over, and you will close the window. This, my friends, is HTML. But you probably already knew that, because it's 2010, basic web languages are basically in our drinking water. So what's this "5" business?

Somewhere in the central command center basement of the internet, there's a group of guys who maintain the standard, or the rules, of HTML. In the case of HTML5, the buck stops with the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), and to a lesser extent, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). It is through these independent standards organizations that new features are codified and presented to the public, and later—in theory—supported by various browsers, no matter what company is behind them.

In the early nineties, the W3C and a few influential torchbearers would collect various new web features thought up by different browser makers, publishing these standards with the hope that we didn't end up with different internets for different browsers. By the mid to late nineties, the standards had grown in both size and stature, then serving as the de facto guide for browser makers and developers alike. (If this sounds a bit rosy, the reality was far grimmer—just ask any seasoned web developer about Internet Explorer, version 6 or earlier.)

Despite an occasionally rocky road, HTML standards went beyond being just a record of changes in web technology; eventually they became the blueprint to push them forward. Still, standards are guides, not laws, and no browser maker has to adopt each and every revision.

The last major revision of the HTML standard, version 4.01, was published in 1999. HTML5 hasn't yet been formally codified, but it was born in 2004 and has been undergoing steady work and maintenance since. In the '90s, HTML discussion centered around topics like font coloration, or tables, or buttons, or something more esoteric. Today, a new HTML version means deep-down support for the modern web, namely web apps and video.

John Herrman - Read the rest on Gizmodo

 

When it comes to the web there are a hundred different ways to accomplish any one thing. The key disciplines in internet programming are structure, style, client-side logic, server-side logic, and storage. There are plenty of languages out there to satisfy each discipline, but they can become obsolete/unused and as the nature of the technologies running the code change, the languages themselves must adapt and change. New innovations and concepts start to pile up as they are discovered in a given language and each developer having to hand code themselves a suite of special functions and method's to take advantage is a massive waste of resources--enter the framework. Frameworks are an incredibly important time saving tool for web developers. Aside from exploiting a given language from every possible angle and putting all that power into the hands of the developer. They make it easy for us to write neater more efficient code, often in more legible and fluent syntax than the original language offered. Frameworks allow the developer to bypass issues like those caused by cross-browser rendering engines, security, and high level language exploits as the necessary work-arounds and hacks are built into the framework. Frameworks are developed by communities, individuals, organizations, and private companies. The luxury of having a team of people working the kinks out of a language and the way it's interpreted is a great one, but it comes at a price. Each framework is developed at a different pace, in a different order, often with a different purpose in mind. So what is the best approach to web development? What is the most effective suite of languages and practices? In the democracy of the web it's important to understand that any given approach is only as good as the support it gets; from the creators, developers, and end users. These are the main factors: which languages, frameworks, and practices are supported and innovated upon by it's creators the most; to the finest degree, which are contributed to and used and documented by the most developers, and which are the most amount of end users capable of viewing. Most end users don't have the experience to question the browser or plugins with which they view the web. They don't care or think about how they get to a virtual destination, they just want to get there and they want everything to work when they do. Due to the politics and business deals of the major players the long standing state of the web has been one of division. End users stuck with browsers that came with their computers, and those who went in search of more functionality (bookmarks, tabs, etc.), or neglect to update, creates a situation where everyone's using different browsers and versions with different interpreters for the code on any given web site. A system where one line of code can be interpreted in 10 different ways depending on the end users who don't have the know-how or control to deal with it, is an immature one. Even in the early growth of the internet these problems were apparent and so the Web Standards movement was born. An increasing amount of web communities, organizations, developers, and private companies are adopting web standards, even the biggest violator of these standards Internet Explorer--infamous for deliberately misinterpreting standards based code in favour of it's own proprietary code, is in development to finally be standards complient. Microsoft claims IE 8 is finally going to adopt many, if not all web standards, but is still in the beginning stages of development, even when they do everyone who uses IE6 and IE7 will not upgrade and so for a very long time it will likely be yet another cross-browser concern. It's important to note that even between the current standards compliant browsers, there is still some wiggle room of how they interpret the standards, some of which can affect user experience and site functionality to a relatively large degree. Until web standards are refined to a point where one line of code has one universal interpretation and the democracy of the web is ruled by those standards and viewed by standards compliant browsers we are stuck having to hack away at code to make our sites and applications usable by as many people as possible. I believe to move towards a culture where our beliefs and values are reality and commonplace, we each have to practice those beliefs and values, regardless of whether they are accepted by our current culture, the norm, or the majority. So anyone reading this visit [http://w3c.org], get a standards compliant browser, I love Firefox 3 [http://firefox.com], and write standards compliant code.