by The release of HTML5 opened new horizons for web developers. Its introduction made a lot of developers to reject Flash technologies in favor of new HTML5. If you are interested in the reasons for such a decision, I’d try to explain you the main differences between the two technologies. Hope you’ll get a clearer view of the situation after reading the article.
Today even regular users are acquainted with HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and have a notion about its main functions, which are, in fact, formatting of text information, pictures and video in a browser. The secrets of HTML technology are really simple and the basics can be learned in a couple of days. Essentially, you need to know that formatting is provided by special tags. And tags are the first distinctive feature of a new HTML version as compared to previous versions.
You may know that a regular site consists of a header, a navigation panel, a content part and footer. In a new HTML version developers have turned these parts into new tags which make the makeup of a site easier and help to make a site structure proper semantically. If you need to create a navigation panel, just mark it with <nav>…</nav> tag and the browsers will understand you. You don’t need to mark the beginning of footer on the comments to the page code – simply mark it with <footer>…</footer> tag and it will be clear both for browsers and for your colleagues who may need to correct your code.
This makes the displaying of a page on mobile devices easier, and, what is more, search engines won’t search and index the content in the header or navigation panel. They will go straight to the piece marked with <article>…</article> tag. It also should be mentioned that all these tags are block tags. It means that you can create unique CSS styles for them.
Tag figure allows simplifying the image description, while tag video will help you to insert a video on your page without using a lot of attributes you needed previously. Simply wrap your video into <video src=…></video> tag. You can also add video control elements (attribute controls), auto-launch (attribute autoplay) or poster (attribute poster=image address). Tag canvas allows (with the help of a small piece of JavaScript code) inserting on your site a simple drawing tool. Tag audio allows inserting audio file with one short line <audio src=…></audio>.
It’s obvious that many things are organized better and simpler than in previous versions. Still, there are some hardcore developers who say that it was senseless to release a new version because old one worked well. But this is the essence of progress: always introduce something better, even if the previous version works well.
But why developers reject Flash? The thing is that many sites and even games based on HTML5 have quality no worse than those based on Flash technologies. At the same time, HTML5 requires less power from your computer or mobile device (this is especially actual for mobile devices). In addition to that, you don’t need to install any plugins for correct HTML5 work. Then, HTML5 is easily crawled and indexed by search engines robots, which is very important for optimization and promotion is search engines. We can’t say the same about Flash. You can’t copy images or text from Flash, you can’t search text n Flash, etc.
Surely, HTML5 has its own drawbacks and problems. Thus, Flash will show properly in any browser, while HTML5 may have some problems with it. HTML5 deals poorly with animation and streaming video – this is where Flash is two steps ahead. Nevertheless, HTML5 successfully competes with Adobe product. For example, it’s a well-known fact that Apple stopped using Flash in favor of HTML5. The main reasons were high demands for resources and low stability level of Flash.
Right now it’s difficult to predict the future of this technology. Modern web industry is rapidly changing every year. And HTML5 standardization is far from being ended. But at the moment this technology seems to be one of the best ones.
