Earlier this month I gave a talk for Basekit Live an event held in London. I would just like to thank Basekit for inviting me along, and putting on a great evening.

I gave a talk on an ongoing media battle at the time. The discussion is of what is best, HTML5 or Flash. Headlines such as “Is HTML5 the Flash killer?”. In my eyes this is a ridiculous debate. And this is why I decided to do a talk this topic. I tried to explain the real situation, so that attendees had more information on the matter.

Please see below, my notes to accompany the slides:

What is HTML?

HTML, which stands for HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant markup language for web pages. It provides a means to create structured documents by denoting structural semantics for text such as headings, paragraphs, lists etc as well as for links, quotes, and other items

Elements of a webpage

What is Flash?

Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash) is a multimedia platform that is popular for adding animation and interactivity to web pages. Originally acquired by Macromedia, Flash was introduced in 1996, and is currently developed and distributed by Adobe Systems.

An animation platform

So What is HTML5?

HTML5 is being developed as the next major revision of HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the core markup language of the World Wide Web. The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) started work on the specification in June 2004 under the name Web Applications 1.0

Still just HTML, Markup Language

New Shiny Things

Yes, there are lots of cool new things to play with in HTML5

• New form elements
• Embeddable video using the new video tags
• Embeddable audio using the new audio tags
• A canvas tag , a new 2d bitmap 
• Various other document structure tags (section, article etc.)
• Various new javascript apis (geolocation, Orientation, drag and drop, web workers, web sockets, local DB, notifications)

HTML5 Animations

NOOOOO!

HTML is JUST markup

SEE.

As always HTML is NOTHING without CSS or Javascript, no animations, no styling.

Why the Confusion

Browsers have started implemented lots of cool things recently:

• HTML5
• Javascript APIS
• webGL (Firefox 4+ only)
• CSS Transformations (WebKit)

Together, everything can do more “useful” things flash, but Flash will still be around for fluff around the edges.

Look into the future (my thoughts)

Live side by side. They are both excellent at different things..

• Flash has built in DRM on videos
• Flash will still be used for fluff
• HTML will be used for data input / output
• HTML5 animation authoring tool