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I’ll say from the outset that I’m not going to answer the question in the title satisfactorily in this post. It’s just a something I’m asking myself at the moment.
I’m no web developer but it’s impossible to not notice the ding-dong between Apple and Adobe and how lots of people are pointing to HTML5 and saying that Flash video is doomed on mobile (and everywhere else).
I do wish they would sort it out. So undignified; like Colin Firth and Hugh Grant fighting in that film my wife made me watch.
A friend recently asked for my thoughts on what impact I thought HTML5 would have on Adobe and the quick answer is I haven’t the foggiest. I have, though been favouriting some blog posts and web stuff about it as I try to catch up with the rest of the world and I though I’d share some. It’s not comprehensive, but it’s a start.
- I liked this infographic from Focus.com (courtesy of the Guardian) as an easy route in to understanding the basics.
- This Minute Bio blog post is a bit more technical (it has a 45min video from Google which is heavy-going) but is a useful jumping off point to some other blog posts specifically…
- …this post on HTML5 competition with Flash and Silverlight from Infoworld.
On my basic, inexpert reading it looks like it would be too rash to say that HTML5 is going to kill Flash. Flash isn’t perfect but it is for the moment an integral part of the web and a key tool for many developers. It would be unrealistic to expect all those developers to down tools and switch to HTML5 when it comes out of beta. It also looks like a lot of the particularly rich web content will have to still be handled by Flash, Silverlight etc.
Implications for Education
I’d be interested to see how this pans out for our community. Further freeing up video on mobile devices can only be a good thing (although, how it all relates to H.264 I don’t yet know) and there are intriguing possibilities for how data can be presented and integrated with location information that may have implications for learning applications.
It will also be interesting to see how this affects web-numpties like me. Will we be presented with a whole new range of tools for sharing and collaborating and will it give non-experts new ways of presenting rich content for web applications? I do like that, from a learner’s perspective, having to rely less on plug ins for a lot of common content could make accessing information a lot easier, especially on mobile devices (although, as my colleague Carl pointed out just now this isn’t going to be some magic bullet that instantly makes all sites mobile friendly).
The consensus over a chat at coffee seemed to be that it’s unlikely to be a revolutionary step for us non-technical educators but there will be benefits for the general web user-experience.
We’ll see.
What are your thoughts on HTML5′s implications for education technology? Have you come across any interesting articles that I should include?
2 Comments until now
I’m not sure HTML5 has specific implications for the education community that are very different to those for broader web community.
It certainly offers an opportunity to do more ‘app’ like stuff in browsers and in an open standards way, with things like offline access, geopositioing and editable elements. If web services that people use in educational settings start using these then hopefully it will make working with them an even better experience across devices/platforms. Whether it will spawn a new set of educational apps, I’m not sure, as developers already have ways to do much of what HTML5 offers.
Like you say, an evolution, rather than a revolution, in our web experience.
I guess the other thing the W3C are working on – linked data/semantic web – could have a much bigger impact on education. I look forward to your post on it
Thanks for adding to this, Steve. Of course, I could have just said that to your face while you were in the office but the moment has passed…
I look forward to my post about semantic web, too. I have absolutely no idea what’s in it so it’ll be a big surprise for all of us!
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