The issue of Flash support for Apple's iPhone and iPad has been causing a stir in the industry. Jobs publicly criticized Adobe at a staff meeting and claimed that the iPad would no longer support Flash technology due to many software problems with Flash. The industry is gradually discussing whether Flash technology will withdraw from the stage of history and whether HTML5 will become an Internet standard.
There is no doubt that Adobe's Flash technology has helped fill the gap in cross-platform multimedia experiences on the Internet. In addition to the hot-selling iPhone and the upcoming iPad, Flash can be found in almost all other operating systems, whether it is a desktop operating system, a mobile operating system or a Web browser.
Flash itself is almost a standard. If you doubt this, you might as well visit the website on a host that does not have Flash player software installed. You will soon see how popular Flash is in Internet applications. Although Flash can serve as a technical standard for the Internet, it is still a vendor's proprietary technology.
Compared with Flash and other proprietary development platforms, such as Microsoft's Silverlight, the advantage of HTML5 is that it is a protocol standard - or at least it can become a standard after the technology matures, unlike Flash That way, it's a single-vendor solution.
In order to hire developers to create and maintain websites, small and medium-sized businesses have to pay a lot of money. Even if the total amount of money may not be huge, at least it is a significant expense relative to their overall budget. Among these websites, these corporate websites generally rely on the use of a large amount of Adobe Flash technology to provide animations and other novel and fashionable interactive content to its users.
Abandoning Flash will require redesigning the website. This workload can be said to be huge. What is even more frightening is that companies will inevitably invest huge sums of money again. However, instead of watching Flash slowly die, small and medium-sized enterprises are likely to decisively abandon Flash and adopt new Internet technologies such as HTML5.
But, for now, Flash isn't really dead. It will take some time for HTML5 to gain enough influence and start to truly threaten Flash.
Shantanu Naranyen, CEO of Adobe, said, “I think one of the challenges facing HTML 5 is still how to display HTML 5 consistently on different browsers. People will have to wait at least another 10 years before HTML 5 becomes an Internet standard that supports many browsers. ”
Since its birth in 2004, HTML5 has been developing for more than five years. Only now has HTML5 become a mainstream Internet technology and begin to show its prominence in web browsers and websites. At present, the latest versions of the three major browsers - Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google's Chrome browser - all contain elements that support HTML5 compatibility.
Although the success of HTML5 does not necessarily mean the death of Flash, Adobe needs to take advantage of the fledgling opportunity of HTML5 to continue to promote the innovation and upgrading of Flash technology, so that it can play an important role even when HTML5 dominates the world. . Although HTML5 can provide the same features and functions as Flash, HTML5 will still not be perfect, so Adobe can take the opportunity to reinvent Flash and fill the gaps in HTML5.
However, Flash is a single-vendor solution. In order to experience Flash, users have to install additional software. The recent dispute with Apple also shows that Flash is not suitable for all platforms.
Small and medium-sized businesses should carefully study to decide whether the company needs to migrate their websites to HTML5 in the future to take advantage of the technical advantages of the HTML5 standard and stay ahead of the curve.