The future of the web

Starting with the desktop, even Microsoft has joined the HTML5 and SVG discussions, two open web standards which provide, among others, the audio/video and vector graphics capabilities of Flash in a way which is compatible with existing web technologies like HTML4 and XML. Google have already put up a version of YouTube which doesn’t require Flash, and are encouraging users to switch to canvas and SVG for graphics, even writing their own plugins to support this in other browsers. Needless to say, Google’s own browser, Chrome, has exceptional support for these technologies already as they see it as part of the future of the web, which they care about. Just another example of Google’s move away from Flash is that they have scrapped the Flash version of their Google PowerMeter widget and are now sending static images down using JavaScript, while (as I understand it) they reimplement the interactive features of the widget in JavaScript.

While Flash is being marginalised from the web for desktop browsers, the same thing is happening in the mobile space. Developers are used to providing non-Flash websites to be compatible with the iPhone (which does not seem to have been held back by its lack of Flash support) and once the site works on the iPhone browser they know that less powerful phones with more basic browsers will be able to render as much of the site as their browser allows, because HTML and other open web standards are designed to degrade gracefully. It is this same principle which allows screen readers (often used by blind people) and other users and devices with particular requirements to extract as much information from pages as they are capable of. Flash, takes a coarser-grained approach, however, where there are 3 choices: the full version of Flash (which is on some of the latest phones), Flash Lite (for more common phones), and no Flash for phones which can’t or won’t include support. The extra complication is that there are actually several different versions of the full Flash, and most users could be running old, even insecure versions of the plugin.

The area where Flash has the least success is the field of Consumer Electronic devices. Manufacturers have understandably wanted to avoid paying a license fee to Adobe for including a Flash player on their devices, even assuming Adobe would offer to make a version of their software for it, and so there has been a push instead for a standard called CE-HTML. This standard is based on HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, so that consumer electronic devices in the future can contain a web browser to allow users to access the web and device-specific functions through a standardised interface. CE-HTML is already supported by TVs sold in Europe (which can play games written in HTML and JavaScript) and will be used as the basis for an HD replacement to teletext next year as part of the HbbTV specification (which may become the standard for broadcast / broadband television used by members of the European Broadcasting Union). It is also already part of the CEA-2014 standard and the IEC 62481-1 standard, as it is the user interface component of the UPnP Audio and Video specifications.

If a company wants to avoid making itself dependent on a closed standard controlled by a single vendor, I think it would not be alone and could move forwards with the rest of the industry to a platform with better prospects.

Does this sound like it could have been originally written as an email? An email which fortunately never needed to be sent?