Does HTML5 really beat Flash?
Out of context: Reply #66
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- ukit0
Go back and read the history of HTML and you realize that apart from the occassional spurts of genius, it's largely a massive 20-year clusterfuck of wasted opportunities. Some of it maybe was the W3C's fault but a much bigger part was the browser war (that competition you speak of) that occured between Netscape and Microsoft during the 90s. When according to your theory we should have been skyrocketing Richard Branson style into the future, instead they spent 10 years "competing" by adding more and more useless features that they made up separately from the W3C like BLINK, MARQUEE, and other useless crap because they thought customers wanted cool, flashy, blinking sites with neverending scrolling text.
Now obviously you want to involve the industry in some way so it's good that Apple and Mozilla stepped up. What we are getting with HTML5 is finally a way to write HTML in a way that makes sense, which is great. I mean, if you think about it, what kind of fucking sense does it make it be writing <div class="header">, "<div class="nav"> and all this other useless shit. And then add in your separate outside technology every time you want to play a video or make an object move across the page. It's like a house where the roof is leaking, but instead of fixing it or building a new roof, you just kept adding more and more buckets to hold the water, and occasionally installing some random thing like a glowing lava lamp or a strobe light in the corner of the room to distract people.
This is holding the web back from being as good as it should be. Right now for instance when search engines index your site, they go in and try to make sense of what is, from their point of view, at least 50% completely arbitrary gibberish. They can pick out some key words and content, but they never REALLY know where the header is, where the global navigation is, etc. Imagine how much better search would be if it actually had that info. And actually not just search - because this extends to all kinds of things where sites exchange data, or to cases where data needs to be displayed in an alternate format, like mobile, TV, screen readers, augmented reality, tons of stuff.
So once you see how worthy of a goal that is, I just think these arguments about whether or not we should replace Flash with HTML5 is ridiculous. Having a standard tag for video and audio is a tiny subset of this overall "fix" of HTML, but just in a design sense, they are important ones to add in.