How can HTML5 “replace” Flash? [closed]

Answer 1

Together with javascripts for tracking GUI events and scripting of the new HTML 5 elements, you get a lot of what Flash offers.

HTML 5 has a number of new elements. One of them is called Canvas. With it you can draw anything you want on screen, within its bounds. You use javascript to draw on it and you can catch any mouseclicks and similar with javascript too. If you are used to GUI toolkits on the desktop like Tk, GTK, you can liken these new elements to some of the widgets of those GUI toolkits.

Take a look at thejit to see an example of graphs in HTML 5

Answer 2

HTML5 is indeed far away from replacing Flash or Silverlight UI technologies. And the problem is not only that HTML5 is limited in amount of required in an app UI components, but also that it doesn't allow create custom ones in such a way that they would integrate into runtime seamlessly.

Take a look at Ample SDK - JavaScript UI Framework, it's architecture largely inherit from what you will find in Flex, Silverlight or Gecko. One of the UI technologies it enables cross-browser is XUL, styleable in CSS and programmable in JavaScript with XUL DOM or jQuery APIs. You can also create your own UI technology on top of the framework.

Answer 3

how it is possible from a technical/coding point-of-view that a text-based markup language (HTML5) could be considered a replacement to a multimedia framework (Flash)?

HTML5 is the new hot name for "web technologies stack", not just a "markup language".

It has a programming language (JavaScript), like Flash does; a set of APIs, significantly expanding as part of the efforts commonly labeled as "HTML5", ways to draw graphics (SVG, <canvas>), play audio and video (<audio>, <video>).

Unlike Flash, the "HTML5 applications" are processed by the browser, not by a proprietary browser plugin, which is good - at least for browser vendors (see the relevant piece of this blog post - thanks Jotham). For example, it makes possible for a browser vendor to fix issues (and not wait for Adobe) -- IIRC Apple cited Flash as being #1 reason for crashes among all crashes on the Mac.

[edited to remove "open standards are better" claims which I am too lazy to back up]

Answer 4

I think that HTML5 will replace most of the flash/flex, which will probably continue as another branch because canvas is cool. New libraries will come. But as long as JS is in a fact singlethreaded it wont be so fast, especially with games, assuming adobe won't give up.

Answer 5

I hope we're talking about How can HTML5 replace swf and flv. Not Flash entirely. I'm a Flash developer (amature). For me, someone who is more artistic minded rather than script programming minded, Flash is fairly easy (most of the time) to use. How do I make a cartoon character walk across the screen in HTML5? Or something simple like morphing (tweening) a circle into a square? Surely I don't have write that as code. I simply am not that clever in the are of programming to achieve that. Flash is relativley simple. Draw all your graphics in what ever app you're comfy with (illustrator for me) then stitch them together with action script. I love you both Apple and Adobe. Please come up with some sort of compromise.

Answer 6

There's much more to Flash than Audio/Video. Recently Flex has been very popular because of it's rich programming model and ability to develop high performance user interfaces.

if HTML 5 or anything has to become popular, first of all the in-built JavaScript engine has to be more efficient. Flex/Flash these days are popular because of robust ActionScript engine.