When Written: April 2010
So, should we ignore Flash and Silverlight and wait for HTML 5 ? Well first thing to consider that whilst the spec for HTML5 is there, it has yet to reach a full standard and also the current browsers do not support it, so I think we have a little while to wait, but it is worth having a look and seeing what is new and perhaps more importantly what is going from HTML.
There is going to be a pile of new tags, the most important one being the already mentioned <video> tag which will allow video to be displayed directly within the browser without any plug ins like Flash, Silverlight or QuickTime. To be able to do this the performance has to be acceptable and the new browsers like IE9 will be using tricks like using the GPU on the graphics card to provide the necessary video rendering performance. Of the deletions the most important thing to go is frames, one hopes that none of you are building new web sites using frames anymore as these have always been search engine unfriendly and unacceptable for some time.
The <center> tag has gone as well, don’t worry if your existing site has either of these or any other of the to be deleted tags as the specification states quite clearly that all future user-clients ( browsers to most of us ) will have to be fully backward compatible. If you want to read more about what is new then take a look at http://www.w3.org/TR/html5-diff/.
Article by: Mark Newton
Published in: Mark Newton