Over at ChromeExperiments.com Google has been putting together a selection of demos showcasing the power of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. We’ve picked out our favourite three below; let us know which ones you like the most in the comments section. Most require a modern web browser – Firefox, Chrome, Safari or Opera. Internet Explorer 9 will also support most of these features when it is released which is scheduled for later this year.



http://9elements.com/io/projects/html5/canvas/

This example using HTML5’s ‘canvas’ element shows how it is possible to integrate great graphics and live social media into an interesting and visually appealing presentation style. You can also see the smooth vector graphics that HTML5 produces – perfectly on par with Adobe Flash, without needing any additional plugins.

http://mrdoob.com/projects/chromeexperiments/ball_pool/

A less useful demo showing the animation and physics abilities that modern web browser can do. The performance is great on a fairly fast PC, and again you can see how you can achieve the exact same results as flash using HTML5. As browser adoption continues to tend towards browsers that support the standard, and JavaScript performance continues to increase due to gains in efficiencies that many browsers are achieving, you’ll see this kind of sophisticated animation on the web far more frequently.

http://mugtug.com/sketchpad/

Sketchpad is a remarkably fully featured graphics application that runs entirely in the browser. Notice the way you can click the ‘save’ icon to copy and paste creations straight into a different application – this could easily be extended to automatically post to Facebook or Twitter, for example. The application also runs on the iPad – allowing true cross platform compatibility without needing to recode it. This level of refined user interface will also become more common across the web.

As you can see; the power of HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript is very impressive. Doing things like this in the browser would have seemed quite unfeasible just a few years ago. When IE9 is released supporting nearly all of these technologies, the final barrier to these applications will be removed. Hopefully people will upgrade quick enough so developers can take advantage of these features as soon as possible.

Adobe has recently seen the opinion of their Flash runtime turn significantly against with Apple joining the fray by refusing to allow the flash plugin to run on MobileSafari. This now means that the iPod, iPhone and iPad have no access to any flash content. Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, has even went as far to say that the ‘majority’ of Mac computer crashes were down to the poor functioning of the Flash plugin.

One of the major criticisms of Flash is the giant overhead that it takes performance wise to run. While recent developments with Flash 10.1 have seen hardware acceleration, the implementation leaves something to be desired – with only some versions of Windows getting access to hardware accelerated video decoding, while Mac and Linux (currently) being left to decode video in software, leading to a dramatic performance penalty.

The other major problem with Flash is the closed nature of the plugin. Attempts to make a competing runtime (such as SWFDec and Gnash) which would be open source currently lag dramatically behind Adobe’s version, offering little-to-no compatibility with most Flash items seen on the web. This means that Adobe is the only one that will provide a plugin. Adobe has recently ‘suspended’ Linux 64-bit Flash player downloads; leaving millions of users without a way to view flash or a viable alternative. Development tools are also dominated by Adobe Flash Builder, which does not run on all platforms.

Furthermore, with search engine optimisation and accessibility being such an important part of the web these days, presenting Flash content while optimising for Google and other search engines poses a difficult issue. Google simply does not pick up the majority of Flash content, which means the site is ‘invisible’ to Google – terrible for improving your ranking on search keywords. Additionally, for users who require larger text, low contrast or screenreaders Flash has generally had very poor options for integrating with these systems.

Adobe has a huge problem on its hands, however. While Flash still commands a huge installed base, with many designers and developers behind it, the tide seems to be turning with the advent of smartphones. Flash recently did release Flash Player 10.1 for Android OS, but performance is not up to scratch and many sites struggle to work correctly with it. Furthermore, the increased performance that Flash requires ends up in very poor battery life as the CPU cannot go into low power mode.

Unless Adobe can dramatically streamline the runtime code to avoid such a significant penalty on the processor, I simply cannot see how in today’s low-power focussed world Flash can turn round the increasingly negative view of its Flash product.

Next time: Why HTML5 and CSS3 present a great alternative to Adobe Flash