[CEUD-ICT] Joe Clark on the (technical) future of e-books...

[Barry McMullin]

On Thu, 11 Mar 2010, Donal J. Rice wrote:

> What's confusing me at the moment is all this talk of the iPad not
> supporting flash which some people say will be replaced in time by HTML 5.
> Having never really caught onto why we needed a HTML 5, (isn't XHTML
> perfectly fine) inspite of Josh's extensive reporting of it on this list, I
> am beginning to think HTML 5 is not the animal I thought it was. Surely
> these are 2 completely different types of technology.  Can HTML 5 render
> images and animation the same way flash does?

In a nutshell: the HTML5 draft includes a new "canvas" element
that provides much of the basic functionality that flash is often
deployed for.  Perhaps more important than its mention in a mere
draft of anything, canvas is actually already supported, out of
the box, by recent versions of Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and
Opera.

So: *if* you could rely on users having browsers that support
HTML5, including natively supporting the canvas element, then
that would (arguably) be a better solution than flash (which
always relies on a browser plugin, due to its proprietary nature,
and - it is argued - has significant stability issues, especially
on anything other than the "core" Internet-Explorer-on-MS-Windows
platform).

On the other hand, of course, we are stuck with the fact that
canvas isn't natively supported by any version of Internet
Explorer, as far as I know.  (On the *other* other hand, the
google "trojan horse" attack may work, whereby more and more
people install the "chrome frame" plugin for Internet Explorer
which basically guts the entire IE rendering engine.  So even
those users can get canvas support, even while retaining the
veneer of still running Internet Explorer...)

Even then, the story is more complicated.  Canvas is definitely
not a drop in replacement for flash; so what if you want stuff
that canvas doesn't do? Well ... there is always SVG, that
patient cinderella of W3C standards, still waiting to be asked to
the ball. (There is, of course, a delicious irony that Adobe
were, for long, key supporters and advocates of SVG - until they
acquired Macromedia, when that enthusiasm for open standards in
this space seemed to somehow falter for some reason...)

Where will it all end? Who knows.  The subtext is, of course, a
fight between Apple and Adobe. As always, us humble users are
just pawns in a much bigger game.

And as to the HTML5 versus XHTML issue: that is a whole other
saga that I will not start on.  Maybe Josh will take it up
<wink>.

Best - Barry.

--
Barry McMullin, Dublin City University
   phone: +353-1-700-5432
   web: http://www.eeng.dcu.ie/~mcmullin/