Has HTML5 Lived Up to the Hype?
HTML5 has become an unavoidable term in tech circles, and has suffered an incredible amount of misuse and abuse at the hands of technology bloggers.
The trouble with judging HTML on its actual merits is that is has transitioned from a useful term to a superfluous ‘buzzword’, largely thanks to a HTML5 hype machine driven by Apple. Yet can a meaningful conversation about HTML5 be salvaged from the wreckage, and is it possible to judge if HTML5 is living up to the hype?
In his now famous essay ‘Thoughts on Flash’, Apple visionary Steve Jobs lambasted Adobe Flash for belong to the ‘PC era’ as opposed to the ‘mobile era’-firing the first shots in an Apple versus Adobe battle over the future of web video and animation. In an argument rather laden with irony, Jobs argued that the proprietary nature of Flash stunted its growth and utility-making the open HTML5 a brilliant substitute from both an ethical and technical point of view.
This rather public statement of distain for Flash caused a tidal wave of blog responses and industry introspection, launching the HTML5 hype machine and dooming Flash with a torrent of bad publicity. While most people acknowledge that Flash can still achieve things that HTML5 cannot, the clunkiness of the platform (especially compared to zippy HTML5) made defending it ever more problematic.
As such as it might pain the anti-Apple crowd to admit, Steve Jobs was indeed on the right side of history by battling against Flash-even if his motives for doing so were less than pure. On the five year anniversary of the announcement of the first iPhone, Flash finally ceded their position in the mobile market by discontinuing Flash for mobile platforms and eventually moving to invest resources in HTML5 research. It was a win for both Apple and for HTML5 proponents.
Yet despite the attention on this debate, Flash is not the only competition that HTML5 has faced off. In fact, HTML has the benefit of being the last one standing among its competitors, so to speak. With Microsoft pulling support for Silverlight, many massive names on the web like NetFlix need to find new ways to deliver their media-and HTML5 is already waiting in the wings to fill that gap in the market.
However, HTML5 has not exactly romped to victory in every niche and market, especially on mobile platforms. In fact, 2012 was actually a particular bad year for HTML5 on mobile devices with major players like Facebook and LinkedIn replacing their HTML hybrid apps in favour of native applications.
Off the back of both the rising hype about HTML5 and the potential benefits, HTML5 apps had a massive upswing in popularity following Job’s Apple endorsement of the technology. Yet problems with speed and flexibility led Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to declare that relying too much on HTML5 was their mobile division’s biggest mistake ever.
It has not all been bad press though: while many app makers are becoming slightly more hesitant to throw trucks of money at HTML5, there is still serious development going on at all levels to see how HTML5 can work best with mobile platforms.
It is not just media-rich websites or app developers that can gain from HTML: it provides enhanced options even for those who simply want to build their own personal websites.
Some however are less optimistic: Drew Crawford wrote a long piece on the weakness of JavaScript which largely enables HTML5.
Perhaps it is too early to judge HTML5: mark-up like any other language is a living thing that constantly grows, ages and renews. While W3C are attempting to ‘finish’ HTML5 by producing a Candidate Recommendation for the language by 2014, they are largely doing so by cutting away unstable or untested parts of the language. The future of HTML5 largely rests on a number of variables that developers cannot control, including the handing hardware specs of mobile devices and mobile browsers actually supporting all the features that HTML5 provides. There is no denying to promise of HTML5, but it still needs more time to be able to live up to the hype.