Our feet are firmly on the ground, so you can keep thinking in the clouds.

Being a company that seeks to bring ease to Internet publishing, with Video taking the central stage, we watch the HTML5 and Flash developments closely.  I have been involved in web development one way or another for most of my adult life (not that I am grown up yet, no) and I have seen a few developments come and go.  Two in particular, HTML and Flash, have stood the test of time, but is that going to change?

It's hard to consider HTML as a 'development' looking back now, but really, it was.  Back in the late 80's and early 90's, when Tim Berners-Lee invented HTML, he had no idea that it would become a defacto standard, and then on to a standard.  HTML no doubt was here to stay.  Fast forward to 1994, and 'Cougar' makes a debut and eventually becomes HTML 4 - a huge leap including support for scripting, styles, extensibility and much more.  HTML 4 remains with us today as the most widely accepted markup language of all time, and it works (for the most part).  HTML 5 is very new, and is making promises to be a better HTML for things we like on the web - animations, video, styling and forms.

Flash has been with us for a long time as well.  John Gay and Robert Tatsumi were doing some cool things with Pen computing, and had a breakout product in SmartSketch (funny enough, the guy who designed Bill Gates' house bought a copy!).  AT&T got involved, bought 'Go' (their company, founded in 1993) and scuttled the project and technology.  The end was looming.  Never to be put down, SmartSketch technology was seen as a way to make animation easier on the Web - but the runtime was Java, horribly slow and crippled at that time.  Something new happened however, the concept of a 'Plugin' was made into reality within the Netscape browser, and a new product came to be named FutureSplash Animator - the grandad of Flash.  Another company sale (this time to Macromedia) and another name change (this time to Macromedia Flash) and a way to bypass the IETF (HTML 4 standard) with a plugin architecture, and Flash went viral.  The rest of course, is history - with that history about to be rewritten with the emerging Flash player 10.1.

We are now at a crossroads, HTML 5 is a draft standard, which will no doubt be accepted by all.  It brings many things Flash has provided for quite some time. Flash is a defacto standard, and has a 99% browser penetration, and does video, animation and complex tasks (wow, that simplifies it too much, Flash purists please forgive!).

Apple is betting on HTML 5 - it brings animation, video, audio, forms and more.  Adobe is betting on Flash - it has animation, video, audio, forms and more. I bet that this will play out for some time, but ultimately, if you can standardize on something - officially - it wins.  Standards take a long time to develop however, partly due to the involvement (and posturing!) of those interested in ensuring the standard supports what 'they' want.

HTML 5 is here to stay.  Flash is here for a long, long time.  Our technology is HTML 4 (XHTML compliant) and uses Flash for video.  We'll watch closely, as per usual. iPhones, iPads, Androids and WebOS's, they are influencers, big ones.

Kieron