Ever since Steve Jobs published the open letter Thoughts on Flash his opinions regarding the Adobe based web standard have become widely known. Starting a trend that they hope others will eventually follow, Apple has excluded Flash support on their most recent mobile devices. As opposed to Flash, Apple has favored up and coming web standards like HTML5. So far, however, they have been slow to demonstrate exactly why open web standards such as HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript are superior to Flash.
This past Friday Apple launched an HTML5 Showcase demonstrating the “flashlike” capabilities of this technology. Included on the page are a series of demos which show the versatility of the HTML5 standard. Apple harps on the point that HTML5 and other similar open web standards are not add-ons or plugins like Flash. Instead, the page notes that these technologies “Are the web. And you can start using them today.” That is, assuming you’re running Safari on a new Mac or on a mobile device such as the iPad. The demos themselves are quite impressive,and range from all types of multimedia content including video, audio, and photos. Apple has also taken time to display how other web staples such as typography, page transitions, and 3-D views appear when utilizing these various open standards.
Besides advertising and video content, online games are perhaps the biggest usage of Flash. To show that HTML5 games can be just as sophisticated, if not more so, Brainium Studios has launched an HTML5 version of their game Hand of Greed. This demo is playable through Safari on both the iPhone and the iPod Touch. While the game is not nearly as refined as some of the demos on Apple’s page, it does offer a sneak peak at the future of open web based gaming.
While these examples provide a nice glimpse of the possibilities of HTML5, only time will tell if these newly emerging open standards ever see the widespread levels of support that Flash has garnered over the years.