Ever wonder what the noise about some new Web programming language can mean for you? With HTML5 the possibilities seem endless. That’s because largely possibilities are endless. HTML5 is a technology that is expected to replace Flash. Ever wanted to build an iPhone app? What if you’ve invested a lot of time and energy optimizing SEO for Flash sites or you’ve counseled against using any Flash? What if you’re using Flash for rich media advertising or lead generation sites? Finally there is common ground with a simple new language platform that HTML5 provides.
From my perspective with search I’ve never been able to support Flash as a medium for publishing full-blown websites. There are some famous cases of Flash gone awry that SEO practitioners should be aware of. Long before SEO I used to make shockwave movies. That was before Google and earlier search engines were important. Flash is fun but don’t let a Flash designer’s glee sabotage your success with too much reliance on it. I’m writing consistently here that Flash is still 99% bad.
The role of Flash never played much of a useful role outside games and when Steve Jobs announced that Flash will not be supported on the iPhone it spelled the doom of Flash. Adobe has now answered the call with a new product called Edge . What Steve Jobs (Google and Microsoft too) have decided is to embrace HTML5. For Apple that means HTML5 enables Web designers to make apps that live outside its Appstore. They all adopted HTML5 regardless what it might mean individually for each company.
That is excellent news content producers and publishers like us. We have a promise of write once, run anywhere applications with powerful new features. My company created an app for mobile which analyzes page information and crawls websites using the technology. Apple has a directory of web apps that take on the look and feel of native apps. With HTML5, your content is search engine friendly and indexable. You can animate with HTML5 and like with Flash: Only the text gets indexed by search engines.
Use Edge or another editor to author pure HTML5 with CSS3 and Javascript animations and capabilities to save time and access Adobe code resources. Edge will export code that you can hack into once you know how to hack HTML5 and the rest. You’re lucky that unlike us you’re able to avoid writing routines that calculate scores for graphing things. You get to let Edge generate code for you. There’s still nothing like doing the work yourself though!
Reports of Flash becoming obsolete jumped the shark. Google Android and WebOS (HP TouchPad) supports Flash. Edge promotes Flash in its editor for specific tasks that are well suited for using Flash. You have to want to build for a specific system is all. For example, if you want to build an Android app that is location aware, you can use a Flash widget from Edge that grabs coordinates from a Google Maps API key and draws on the Android screen in reference to geo location. The possibilities are endless. Investigate how you can build apps, design forms, capture information and much more with HTML5.
