I’m not one to believe there is any such thing as a true “cross-platform” technology when it comes to games.
A very sober, albeit technical, look at the HTML5 as a game development platform.
“Silverlight is our development platform for Windows Phone,” he said. Silverlight also has some “sweet spots” in media and line-of-business applications, he said.
But when it comes to touting Silverlight as Microsoft’s vehicle for delivering a cross-platform runtime, “our strategy has shifted,” Muglia told me.
Silverlight will continue to be a cross-platform solution, working on a variety of operating system/browser platforms, going forward, he said. “But HTML is the only true cross platform solution for everything, including (Apple’s) iOS platform,” Muglia said.
Few weeks ago I was listening to an interview with an author of browser based audio editor, who decided to implement his project in Silverlight. While he got some valid technical points concerns about HTML5 performance, betting on proprietary technology that depends totally on some company's politics and CTO's mood sounds like a much worse idea. Here's why.
The thing is, the core problem isn’t that the name is too fuzzy. It’s what the name implies. HTML5 sounds like a technology which goes through a beta period and is finally complete. Instead, what the tech press calls “HTML5″ is really a continual process of improving the web browsers that people use. And honestly, that’s how I’d like to see the tech press cover us. Not as group of people working towards a singular milestone that will change the web as we know it, but as a group that has gotten our groove back.
Yehuda Katz (of Rails and jQuery fame) is concerned about missuse of HTML5 name. HTML5 became a moniker for everything from non-Flash video to Web 3.0 – whatever it is. Fortunately, this problem doesn't matter at all. Move on.
This was a technology often used in 8-bit video games of the era, to achieve interesting visual effects by cycling (shifting) the color palette. Back then video cards could only render 256 colors at a time, so a palette of selected colors was used. But the programmer could change this palette at will, and all the onscreen colors would instantly change to match. It was fast, and took virtually no memory. Thus began the era of color cycling.
1990's techniques make their way back with HTML5 and mobile devices.
HD video begs to be watched in full screen, but that has not historically been possible with pure HTML
YouTube's stance on Flash vs HTML5 <video>. No surprise there: Flash is still the only viable option now. But the article itself is worth reading as it provides pragmatic rationale why web standards are not there yet.
Q: How is Adobe going to react to HTML5?
A: I wouldn’t say reacting to HTML5. We see whatever people are using to express themselves. … We’re going to make great tooling for HTML5. We’re going to make the best tools in the world for HTML 5.
I'm looking forward.
In my opinion, the best way for Adobe to save Flash (the development and authoring environment) is by killing Flash (the plugin), and targeting a HTML5 runtime directly.
Flash CS4 is one of the best authoring environments for designers and illustrators to easily create and animate rich, graphical media on the web. No, it is *the* best. Being able to easily import vector artwork from Illustrator, drag and drop PNGs around, resize things and manipulate them in a WYSIWYG editor, without mucking around in the world of HTML/CSS/Javascript?
Not that I believe that authoring CSS, HTML and JS is easy on a technical level, or that Adobe is likely to give up the advantage of control over its proprietary formats. But maybe that's not such a bad idea, after all.
So why doesn't Mozilla just license H.264 (like everybody else)? One big reason is that that would violate principles of free software that we strongly believe in. In particular, we believe that downstream recipients of our code should be able to modify and redistribute it without losing any functionality. This is freedom that copyleft licenses such as the GPL and LGPL (which we use for our code) are intended to ensure. It is possible to obtain patent licenses in a way which works around the letter of the GPLv2 and LGPLv2, but honoring the letter while violating the spirit is not a game we are interested in playing.
An explanation why new HTML5-based YouTube and Vimeo don't work in Firefox.
