HTML and CSS Reference
In-Depth Information
So adoption is fragmented, and support is often limited but growing. Apple's first release of the iPhone implemented
only some features of the new web standard; in reality, HTML5's adoption is still, to this day, very fragmented. In the
desktop space, browsers are all at varied levels of HTML5 compliance, and compliance is always changing because
the spec is not finalized. You see how confusing this can get? If you visit beta.html5test.com , you'll be able to see how
your browser ranks against the current HTML5 spec. Chances are it is subpar in the overall scope of HTML5, with
some features completely unsupported. You may ask, “Why still choose to use it?” Well, it's OK! In fact at the time
of this writing, only the bleeding-edge beta browsers, like the Chrome Canary, Firefox, and Webkit Nightly builds,
support most of the latest and greatest features (but not all). Current HTML5 adoption is nominal; you can see how
much of a headache it is for developers and designers to create a unified experience in this fragmented area. It's very
reminiscent of the early Web; still, we need to start taking advantage of HTML5's features if we want penetration on
mobile and tablet devices. For advertisers, this is a must!
HTML5 Video
One small feature of HTML5's overall feature set—it was dubbed in some blogs and news forums the “Flash Killer”—is
HTML5 video (it will be covered in more detail in Chapter 7 ) . I'd like to take a minute to set the record straight, as
many educated developers have done before. First, because Flash is a platform, it requires a plug-in to play video
within your browser. Flash can support progressively downloaded video as well as streaming. It can also support video
from various protocols and adaptively change during playback. Second, as HTML5's video element is a tag within the
HTML markup, dealing with this tag at the present time has limitations. For example, pretty much each browser takes
its own file wrapper and codec to render the video correctly. This proves to be a huge task for video transcode jobs,
and anyone attempting to have video within their creative. Also, as there is no standard for streaming video through
HTML5, more development is needed in that realm as well.
A very comprehensive article written by online video great Robert Reinhardt outlines the fragmentation around
HTML5's video element, not to mention the overall support for HTML5 (see “The World of Pain That Is HTML5
Video”: transitioning.to/2012/01/the-world-of-pain-that-is-html5-video/ ) . Things like streaming and
adaptive bitrate are all things outlined within the article.
HTML5 vs. Flash on Mobile
For advertisers in the modern world, mobile is a key platform to target, and it's important to know what evolving tech
can achieve here. It's pretty safe to say that mobile was indeed primitive in the beginning, when the only smartphones
were Nokias, Palms, and Blackberrys and their web browsers were . . . well, for lack of a better word, awful. Around the
late 2000s, since the arrival of the Apple iPhone, mobile has become a huge market. Many people saw this coming.
Thanks to the iPhone's web browser, it offered something of an actual web experience with full functionality, unlike
earlier devices that offered the Web but in a different view. Web developers and designers, heavily invested in Flash,
needed to ensure that the decision makers on the business end understood that their online initiatives would need to
support the growing market share of HTML5 on mobile devices—and OH BOY, was it growing!
There is a lot of confusion within the industry as it relates to the HTML5/Flash debate. Many startups in the
field saw this; they raced into this market, using fear as fuel, to provide services that eased this transition, which in
turn moved HTML5 along even faster. Companies like Adobe and Google started making tools that would take Flash
timeline animation and repurpose it into HTML, CSS3, and JavaScript animations for emerging browsers to render
without use of the Flash Player plug-in.
With Apple's iOS taking up a massive share of the mobile operating system market, Google's Android and
Blackberry's Playbook were being released with support for Flash. Adobe's credo would be that users of these devices
would get the “complete web experience” and that Flash Player would be supported and installed on mobile devices
in their product road map. In fact, Adobe released this statistic outlining the future support of Flash Player on mobile
into 2015 (see Figure 2-3 ).
 
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