Wednesday, March 02, 2011

Adobe's HTML5 Story?

Have you ever written something that you won't have to take action on for a long time and then later thought "what have I got myself into"?  I did just this by submitting a talk for Web 2.0 Expo, taking place this month in San Francisco, CA at Moscone West.  I've spoken at the Web 2.0 Expo events several times before and they have been really valuable.

My talk is entitled"HTML5, Flash and AJAX to the Year 2020".  The official description (with a typo fixed) reads as follows:

"This session will take a deep and pragmatic look at the complete architectural capabilities and suitability of HTML5, Flash and AJAX related technologies in an attempt to separate the fact from fiction. While the media has sometimes pitched headlines such as “HTML5 vs. Flash”, the reality is that almost 100% of Flash relies on HTML and JavaScript today. Flash is not even directly comparable to HTML5 whereas the SWF file format might be a closer comparison. Do not dismiss this session as an Adobe push for Flash, the reality is that Adobe is very excited about helping drive HTML5 and the advancement of the W3C standard is going to have a significant impact on Adobe CS products such as Dreamweaver, video tools and Photoshop.


What HTML5 brings to the table is “choices” for those who are implementing future applications on the web and in order to make decisions, an understanding of the forces working against their desired outcome needs to be facilitated. The speaker will look at several specific areas such as video and simple animations and show benchmarks and optimizations that can be done to create an overall good user experience. Data will be shared as well as hypothesis about when one technology may offer an advantage over another."

While I am open to suggestions on specific areas to cover, my first homework is going to be to reread the latest drafts of both the W3C HTML5 and Adobe Shockwave Flash specifications.  I want to deliver some real content based on fact.  So far the talk will feature the following segments (subject to change):

- discussing possible definitions of what people really mean when they say "HTML5" (+ AJAX)  and "Flash"
- discussing the capabilities of each, weaknesses, and where hybrid solutions occur
- predictions on where these technologies may drift in the next 9 years

The last part will obviously be a wild guess.  No one could have predicted that any consumer can use a 0.6 cm thick device with a 800 X 480 pixel display to access the full published knowledge of mankind 9 years ago.  Thinking that such devices have GPS, HD video cameras, voice recognition etc. makes me wonder how the hell I can give an accurate description of the three technologies into the year 2020.

FWIW - I have recorded several interviews on this topic and while I do not consider myself an expert, I'd also like to hear feedback on these articles:

O'Reilly Radar - http://radar.oreilly.com/2011/02/flash-html5-developers.html
DZone Interview - http://css.dzone.com/videos/talking-about-html5-mobile-web?mz=8019-adobe&default=false&zid=159&browser=14&mid=0&refresh=0

I am therefore asking for anyone who has ideas to contact me.  Not ruling anything out at this point!  Crowd-sourcing is not cheating - just a great way to use collective intelligence.

2 comments:

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  2. @alax - i have deleted your comment because you are a filthy, disease ridden spammer. You and your shit-hole company earnlancer are not ever permitted to post here again. Moron!

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