A colleague sent me this link to a collection of parallax scrolling website designs. Some of them are really awesome, especially considering the fact that they are implemented in HTML5 – no flash or other proprietary plugin required. I particularly liked how the car assembles and disassembles on the Smart USA website and how the glass of beer empties and refills on the Smokey Bones website. Unbelievable, creative, and inspirational!
SlideShare is a social network where people share presentations and other documents. If you ever attended any conferences, talks or group meetings, chances are the slides for that were uploaded and made available on the SlideShare. Until now, though, using those slides was a bit awkward, since they were always converted to Flash. Your browser had to have a plugin, it was difficult or impossible to copy-paste text from slides, search was weird, and access from the mobile was very limited. Gladly, SlideShare announced that they are moving from Flash to HTML5 which by itself should fix all those nuances and provide for some more useful features.
Here are their reasons for switching:
- The exact same HTML5 documents work on the iPhone / iPad, Android phones/tablets, and modern desktop browsers. This is great from an operations perspective. This saves us from extra storage costs, and maximizes the cache hit ration on our CDN (since a desktop request fills the cache for a mobile request, and vice-versa). It’s also great from a software engineering perspective, because we can put all our energy into supporting one format and making it really great.
- Documents load 30% faster and are 40% smaller. ‘Nuff said on that front, faster is ALWAYS better.
- The documents are semantic and accessible. Google can parse it and index the documents, and so can any other bot, scraper, spider, or screen-reader. This means that you can write code that does interesting things with the text on the slideshare pages. You can even copy and paste text from a SlideShare document, something that was always a pain with Flash.
Read the full story to learn about some of the difficulties they experienced during this migration.
Here is a quote directly from Google’s Inside Search blog:
We now support markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages. For example, if an author at The New York Times has written dozens of articles, using this markup, the webmaster can connect these articles with a New York Times author page. An author page describes and identifies the author, and can include things like the author’s bio, photo, articles and other links.
If you run a website with authored content, you’ll want to learn about authorship markup in our help center. The markup uses existing standards such as HTML5 (rel=”author”) and XFN (rel=”me”) to enable search engines and other web services to identify works by the same author across the web. If you’re already doing structured data markup using microdata from schema.org, we’ll interpret that authorship information as well.
[…]
We know that great content comes from great authors, and we’re looking closely at ways this markup could help us highlight authors and rank search results.
In simple terms, this means that you should make sure that all your content – no matter where it is published – identifies you as an author. This will help link all your content together, create your author profile, and use that as yet another criteria in ranking and searching. Those of you publishing with WordPress shouldn’t worry at all – adding authorship is either already done or will take a minor modification to the theme. WordPress provided both author pages and XFN markup out of the box for years.
Here is a quote for you on browser compatibility from an excellent book Diving Into HTML 5, which is available online.
The last time I tried to count, there were 5 doctypes that triggered “almost standards mode,” and 73 that triggered “quirks mode.” But I probably missed some, and I’m not even going to talk about the crazy shit that Internet Explorer 8 does to switch between its four — four! — different rendering modes. Here’s a flowchart. Kill it. Kill it with fire.
And just in the flowchart link will break anytime soon, here is a copy of the image.
There is a lot of rumble going around the Web now on the future of Adobe Flash. Some say that Flash is here to stay. Others believe that when HTML5 will be a norm, Flash will die out. Others believe in some other technology or in the mix or in none of the above. But everyone has something to say.
I just read a lengthy Slashdot discussion of this post by John Dowdell, who is working for Adobe in San Francisco, and who is not worried about Flash future.
There’s really no “HTML vs Flash” war. There are sure people inciting to create such a war, and individual developers may have strong practical reasons to choose one technology over another, but at corporate levels that drive strategy, all delivery channels are important Adobe territory, whether SWF or HTML or video or documents or paper or ebook or e-mag or film or packaging or whatever. Adobe profits by making it easier for creatives to reach their audiences.
On the other hand, a few month ago, back in Karlsruhe, Germany, I was in the audience for the keynote speech by Patrick Lauke of Opera fame. During that speech he presented a few developments – HTML5 and CSS3 among others – that clearly showed that there is a strong alternative coming for at least some of Flash’s functionality. How soon? The time will tell.
And yet there was yet another important announcement on the subject today. Google Chrome releases blog mentioned a new version of the browser, released today, with integrated Adobe Flash plugin. There was a link for more detailed explanations of such a change to Chromium blog. It looks like there is something bigger going on:
[…] we are working with Adobe, Mozilla and the broader community to help define the next generation browser plug-in API. This new API aims to address the shortcomings of the current browser plug-in model.
I think that whatever the upcoming alternatives are, Adobe Flash is here to stay. It won’t necessarily stay as we know it now. After all we now know a better Flash than we knew initially (read some Adobe Flash history). But it surely is not going anywhere any time soon.
And if you need examples of stale technologies on the web, think Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. It’s over 10 years old. Everybody hates. Even Microsoft is advising everyone to upgrade. Better technology exists for years now. And yet we still have MSIE6 hanging around and no apparent way of getting rid of it. And Adobe Flash, with all its limitations and shortcomings, is way better than MSIE6.
