Six months ago, a guy talking about the future of Interactive media quoted a study that said that about 30% of the browsers in use were HTML5 compliant (mostly because of Firefox, since they were an early adopter). The other day another guy on a webinar said the figure was now 67%. That’s quite an increase in just 6 months. And by the first of the New Year, I would bet that figure will be over 80%, as people update their browsers to the latest version (IE9, for instance).
So now the majority of web experiences use the new HTML5 standards. Add to this the recent news that Adobe will not be updating Flash for any new mobile OS, and you have a major shift in media distribution over the internet. It was great to have Flash on 98% of the browsers for a couple of years. It made it easy to distribute video and motion graphics. But the shift to mobile doomed that technology.
Apparently the Flash plug-in was unstable on mobile devices, causing them to crash, and using up too much power and processor resources. I wrote about the shift in consumption to mobile devices here recently (hasn’t everyone?). That doesn’t mean that Flash is dead, far from it. It’s still ubiquitous, and the advice from the folks at Brightcove is that it should still be your first choice for a video distribution format. But Flash alone won’t cut it anymore, and we’ll have to serve up multiple file formats for the foreseeable future. We’re all caught up in another format war between the big tech companies, and it’s not likely that anyone will “win” anytime soon. Even within a particular OS, there are differences from one device to another that may cause your file to play poorly or not at all. So we’re stuck with complexity in serving media for a while.
They are still referring to HTML5 as an “emerging” technology, but I’d say it’s already emerged, and by next year it’ll be the standard. What this means is that any web site that was designed using earlier specs will need to be updated. This was bought home to me personally recently. I upgraded to the latest version of Firefox, and when I checked out my own site’s Home page, it didn’t display properly. All of the blank areas, which were supposed to be black, showed up white (this only happened in Firefox, not in any of the other browsers). It took me a couple of hours of digging to figure out what was going on. It turns out that the <bgcolor> tag is not supported in the <body> anymore, and you have to use CSS to control any of the style attributes in HTML5.
Those brilliant folks at W3C have created a great website to teach you all of the new rules and changes to the spec, which I found very helpful (http://www.w3schools.com). It even shows you examples of HTML5 and CSS compliant code for each tag, which you can copy and paste into your site’s code. Nice. It’ll still be a lot of work to revise all of the web sites out there, but worth it, because the new <video> and <canvas> tags are going to make distributing videos and motion graphics so much easier. Not to mention all of the cool new things designers will be able to do with them. The multimedia party is about to start for real, and it’ll work just as well on mobile devices this time.
If you haven’t checked out your site using the latest Firefox browser (version 8), you should. You may be surprised that the appearance or functionality of some elements don’t work anymore. And then you’ll have to get it fixed, so that it’s HTML5 compliant. But once that’s done, you should be cool for a long time. It took about 7 years to get this new spec published, and it’ll be around for a long time. Isn’t the web great?
Evan Petty's Blog 