Thursday 26 January 2012

In a Flash - How HTML5 Can Help Developers With Rich Media

As many developers seek new standards for developing games, videos and rich media, HTML5 has emerged as a plug-in-free alternative for many. While the technology and standards are still actively being developed by W3C, the consortium that oversees web standards in conjunction with industry leaders, there are clear opportunities for rich media within the platform. As Flash provided a common framework for development for major video sites such as You Tube, Google itself is exploring opportunities for web-based HTML5 development on the platform with open source codecs. While the technology is not necessarily production ready on a large scale, developers looking to the future can identify growing opportunities to build upon the standards to improve an overall performance.

Even as Flash technology continues to evolve, rich media based upon HTML 5 offers advantages that Flash cannot, including more customization through Javascript and unique styling elements through CSS. The latest versions of Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Chrome all feature a wide variety of HTML5 implementations that aim to allow for native development and playback. As the standards coalesce around a common platform, open source rich media offers opportunities for developers to integrate gaming, video and media into existing applications without relying upon Flash based plug-ins. The opportunity to seamlessly use PHP, HTML and CSS to develop rich media applications allows developers to craft a single solution for mobile and desktop based users on nearly any operating system.

In contrast to Flash, HTML5 can be optimized for speed independent of the user's system resources - while Flash locked developers into a single platform and potentially constrained their ability to develop, HTML5 offers a wide variety of potential solutions through which producers, artists and developers can scale system resources over time. As the technology continues to evolve along with browsers you will not be required to remain in lock step with the latest releases of Adobe Creative Suite and can instead focus on native development.

Since CSS and HTML 5 pair up seamlessly, the same standards for developing rich media apply to basic front end web development. One of the major changes the HTML5 is the integration of structure elements into the pages, including "header", "nav", "section" and "aside" tags which firmly integrate HTML along with CSS so you can style your entire pages. The tight integration with styling can also help inform a more efficient development process. In the context of rich media you can uniquely style the surrounding area to enhance media consumption, as well as create styling elements for the entire page.

Moving toward an integrated standard with HTML5 technology can allow you to better utilize animation, colors, sound and a variety of rich media components within your sites. The tight integration with core HTML allows you to create native web applications that are nearly universally accessible and enjoyed.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/4721570

2 comments:

  1. The thing is most people forget flash is most likely used for online videos, some people likely won't upgrade to swf to html5 converterwith in browser no codecs required support. Even though most of us will! Adobe needs to refocus on sites using flash for things other then video (kind of like what microsoft is doing with silverlight).

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