Developers of today are right now heavily at work on a standard that could modify the entire browsing experience as we know it. It’s normally referred to as HTML 5.0, and some recent press releases have begun to question the dominance of content-oriented browser plugins like Microsoft Silverlight.
Because video has become such an integral block of the modern web experience, it can be off-putting to be reminded of the concept that most of the videos we see comes filtered through a web browser add-on. There’s not really anything inherently wrong with such a notion, despite a few reservations.
Open Standards and The Web.
But the internet is run on open, compatible standards. At the moment, all the standards for flash video are in the hands of Adobe. While there’s almost no chance of Adobe going bust, the important thing is that having every ‘rich’ web experience downloading through the addon of a private developer rubs against the open standards that make up the www itself.
Thus HTML 5.0 has chosen itself to sort out this issue. Today, huddles of web developers are hard at work sorting out a new set of standards for the www, a standard that that can define rich web content and make it possible for videos and other multimedia content to be contained directly in the HTML protocol, not passed through browser additions.
As Designers, Do We Need to Care Now?
This matters because the internet of the moment will appear quite different in the following months. While a sizable quantity of the rich functionality will surely replicate the proper elements of the rich addons we’re accustomed to, the amount of changes attainable inside any web browser shall go beyond that.
Go ahead and take a quick peek at what companies like Google have accomplished with contemporary HTML practices (think of how flowing Google Maps works), and all the innovative technologies that have been placed into our standard web experiences, imagine an entirely new layer of possibilities above and beyond this one.
Do I have to Learn HTML 5.0 Now?
Likely not when we’d all like. WWW standards require a very great time to develop and integrate, as they have to be absolutely universal, accessible, and work across all standardized platforms. It’s exactly like creating a brand new language, and this one is definitely on track to be the most complicated so far.
Most of the sober guesses put the time-frame for entire, rich HTML 5.0 standardization somewhere way in the future, perhaps eight years. While elements of the new standard shall become used much before that date (many are already being adopted as I type this), the full acceptance by the major browsers, spanning all platforms, is really too complex and demands too much work to happen quickly.
Flash Will Still Be Around For A While
Publicly, they aren’t that worried. In their minds, who knows? Press releases from all three browser add-on developers, there shall always be a place for rich content, and developing an entire brand on one function (let's say, flash streaming video) is never a 100% profit-builder anyway.
By the time the HTML 5.0 standard becomes widely accepted, add-on creators will have had plenty years to create enhanced advancements that will not be matched by the new standard, and surely we shall probably be in the same pot anew.