Is HTML5 better than flash? “But again with the lack of semantics, linkability, and interoperability.”
I’ll stipulate that interoperability may be better. Or maybe not. Provided the user is using one of the three behemoth browser engines. And maybe not then. I still have tons of issues where this site or that site won’t work on my phone, or in firefox, or wherever. Flash actually was a mostly consistent experience in the places where it worked, and when it didn’t work, that experince (“you need to install flash”) was also consistent. Now when a website breaks, I don’t know what flavor of incompetence is the source of the damage, so I don’t know what browser I need to install to view it.
Linkability is a sad joke. Mostly it still doesn’t work with single page apps, and where it does it “work”, the primary effect is to fuck up history and break complicated workflows like pressing the back button. Also, hashbang links are somewhat dubious, because the content can’t be fetched by anything less than a full blown browser. My RSS reader can’t even begin to handle them.
And semantics? lol. It should be possible to write a user agent that interprets semantic tags and offers a different presentation. Perhaps a screen reader, but that’s just one example. Instead, however, we live in a world where if a browser implements anything less than pixel perfect rendering, websites are unintelligible blobs. One javascript error and you’re sitting at nothing but a blank page. How is that semantic?
Flash was bad at a lot of things, but at least Flash was good at what it was good at. Its replacement can’t even say that.
I still have tons of issues where this site or that site won’t work on my phone, or in firefox, or wherever.
Aside from corporate intranets, is this really true? Some websites may not look ideal in a phone browser, but almost all are accessible from one.
Now when a website breaks, I don’t know what flavor of incompetence is the source of the damage.
You didn’t with Flash either. I think you are looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses, I remember plenty of Flash sites that would have problems with certain screen sizes, sometimes they’d freeze, other times parts of the site were hidden. As with the open web, this is a fault of the site, not the technologies used to render it.
Linkability is a sad joke. Mostly it still doesn’t work with single page apps, and where it does it “work”, the primary effect is to fuck up history and break complicated workflows like pressing the back button.
The web wasn’t made for apps, and what you are complaining about is caused by abuse of the web to force it to serve as an app delivery platform. This isn’t necessarily bad. In a web app, the browser becomes more of a VM than a content delivery platform, and the back button doesn’t have any real use, since the app’s state changes in real time. The problem is when the technologies used for web apps are used for websites, where you do want to be able to use the back button. This is simply a case of using the wrong tool for the job.
Linkability totally exists in the web when it’s used as intended.
Also, hashbang links are somewhat dubious, because the content can’t be fetched by anything less than a full blown browser. My RSS reader can’t even begin to handle them.
Absolutely true, and I think the author of the article would agree with you. If we go forward using anti-patterns like these, we’re breaking one of the things that makes the web special.
And semantics? lol. It should be possible to write a user agent that interprets semantic tags and offers a different presentation. Perhaps a screen reader, but that’s just one example. Instead, however, we live in a world where if a browser implements anything less than pixel perfect rendering, websites are unintelligible blobs. One javascript error and you’re sitting at nothing but a blank page. How is that semantic?
Again, you are blaming the technology for bad implementations. You’re also trying to make it seem like the majority of sites are rendered by javascript, which is untrue. There are some webapps that are rendered with javascript, and a startling amount of small javascript-rendered sites are starting to emerge (which absolutely do not need to be rendered with javascript). This is a bad thing, but it’s not the web’s fault, it’s the developers fault, who are using React/Angular for everything just because it’s the latest fad.
Lastly, I think you’re skipping one of the biggest things that makes the web better than Flash, and that’s the fact that it’s open. Flash gave you no access to the internals of a website’s frontend, and many of my generation of web developers got their start through viewing other site’s source code. This is nothing to be scoffed at.
I think it is fair to complain about (even blame) the technology under the knowledge that if it exists, it will be abused. When the said technology isn’t there, you don’t get to suffer the consequences of poor implementation or use of it.
Those who know me know me as a strong opponent of JS on the web. But if it were only used as (I) intended, I wouldn’t utter one objection. That would be a parallel dimension with unicorns.
Concrete example: I haven’t used flash (on a primary desktop) for over a decade. So I have some idea of what life was like with neither flash nor html5. I remember that posts on blogspot were generally readable. Nobody seemed to think converting blogspot to use flash as a presentation layer was a good idea. But today, we have recreated faux flash in the browser, and sure enough, blogspot uses it, resulting in about half the posts I read being nothing but blank pages.
The transition from “should I use flash for this?” to “should I use react+angular+jquery for this?” has somehow also resulted in the default answer flipping from “no” to “yes”. And I think that’s not merely the fault of bad developers. The messaging has switched from “flash if you must” to “html5 because you can”.
Good point, I see where you are coming from now. I too have noticed this, and I think it’s really a bad trend.
Just pointing out a technicality, but HTML5 should be used everywhere in my opinion, as it’s more semantic. HTML5 just gives us things like the header, article, footer, and aside tags, which are much better than using divs.
I think you mean to say that the message has changed from “flash if you must” to “React/Angular/<insert hip new js rendering framework> because you can”. ;)
Also blogspot is definitely the worst offender I’ve seen regarding all this, in fact, it’s been bad since they introduced their “modern” themes in 2008-ish. I’m pretty sure the failure rate for those pages on a bad connection are around 50%.
Yes, that’s a good clarification. “HTML5” is kind of a catch phrase for many things. Not just the defined standard features, but the frameworks built on top. For example, it’s accurate to say HTML5 gave us history.pushState(), much to my annoyance. But the feature is rarely used outside of these mongo frameworks. How do I best articulate my displeasure? Perhaps “modern” would be a better term, but I don’t really like overloading a term with sardonic meaning.
Yeah, I’m not completely sure what all you are opposed to as far as javascript frameworks are concerned, but for me, the thing I hate the most is not putting content in the HTML, and rendering with javascript. HTML+CSS were designed for displaying content, to reinvent the wheel in javascript is crazy IMO. I mean, content is static, HTML is static, CSS is static. Javscript is dynamic. Unless your content is also dynamic (like with a true web app such as Google docs), javascript rendering, to me at least, makes zero sense.
You should at least be able to view most pages on the web without JS. Not saying you have to be able to submit stuff and get full functionality, since some of that is impossible without JS, but you should definitely be able to READ a doggone blog post. Not to mention the fact that these folks are sort of killing themselves anyway since google bots don’t read content that’s not in the HTML.
Just realized I didn’t get around to actually answering your question. I think what you mean instead of “HTML5” is probably “Javascript Page Rendering” which is where all the content gets put on the page and formatted with javascript, instead of HTML and CSS, causing it to become extremely brittle and unusable with JS turned off or broken.
How well does view source work these days? The web page for a single tweet is 500K of html shell, plus another 500K of obfuscated minimized javascript. What can I learn from that?
BTW, your link doesn’t work. It just goes to the top of the page, not any particular comment.
On complex sites, opening the dev tools let’s you unobfuscate all that JS and organizes the HTML into a nice interactive tree. On simpler websites, view source definitely still works.
Hmm.
Is HTML5 better than flash? “But again with the lack of semantics, linkability, and interoperability.”
I’ll stipulate that interoperability may be better. Or maybe not. Provided the user is using one of the three behemoth browser engines. And maybe not then. I still have tons of issues where this site or that site won’t work on my phone, or in firefox, or wherever. Flash actually was a mostly consistent experience in the places where it worked, and when it didn’t work, that experince (“you need to install flash”) was also consistent. Now when a website breaks, I don’t know what flavor of incompetence is the source of the damage, so I don’t know what browser I need to install to view it.
Linkability is a sad joke. Mostly it still doesn’t work with single page apps, and where it does it “work”, the primary effect is to fuck up history and break complicated workflows like pressing the back button. Also, hashbang links are somewhat dubious, because the content can’t be fetched by anything less than a full blown browser. My RSS reader can’t even begin to handle them.
And semantics? lol. It should be possible to write a user agent that interprets semantic tags and offers a different presentation. Perhaps a screen reader, but that’s just one example. Instead, however, we live in a world where if a browser implements anything less than pixel perfect rendering, websites are unintelligible blobs. One javascript error and you’re sitting at nothing but a blank page. How is that semantic?
Flash was bad at a lot of things, but at least Flash was good at what it was good at. Its replacement can’t even say that.
Well, I think that’s a little harsh.
Aside from corporate intranets, is this really true? Some websites may not look ideal in a phone browser, but almost all are accessible from one.
You didn’t with Flash either. I think you are looking at the past with rose-tinted glasses, I remember plenty of Flash sites that would have problems with certain screen sizes, sometimes they’d freeze, other times parts of the site were hidden. As with the open web, this is a fault of the site, not the technologies used to render it.
The web wasn’t made for apps, and what you are complaining about is caused by abuse of the web to force it to serve as an app delivery platform. This isn’t necessarily bad. In a web app, the browser becomes more of a VM than a content delivery platform, and the back button doesn’t have any real use, since the app’s state changes in real time. The problem is when the technologies used for web apps are used for websites, where you do want to be able to use the back button. This is simply a case of using the wrong tool for the job.
Linkability totally exists in the web when it’s used as intended.
Absolutely true, and I think the author of the article would agree with you. If we go forward using anti-patterns like these, we’re breaking one of the things that makes the web special.
Again, you are blaming the technology for bad implementations. You’re also trying to make it seem like the majority of sites are rendered by javascript, which is untrue. There are some webapps that are rendered with javascript, and a startling amount of small javascript-rendered sites are starting to emerge (which absolutely do not need to be rendered with javascript). This is a bad thing, but it’s not the web’s fault, it’s the developers fault, who are using React/Angular for everything just because it’s the latest fad.
Lastly, I think you’re skipping one of the biggest things that makes the web better than Flash, and that’s the fact that it’s open. Flash gave you no access to the internals of a website’s frontend, and many of my generation of web developers got their start through viewing other site’s source code. This is nothing to be scoffed at.
I’m leaving the author’s reply to comments on the article here as it’s also relevant. (Oh look, links! It even works if you click it!)
I think it is fair to complain about (even blame) the technology under the knowledge that if it exists, it will be abused. When the said technology isn’t there, you don’t get to suffer the consequences of poor implementation or use of it.
Those who know me know me as a strong opponent of JS on the web. But if it were only used as (I) intended, I wouldn’t utter one objection. That would be a parallel dimension with unicorns.
Concrete example: I haven’t used flash (on a primary desktop) for over a decade. So I have some idea of what life was like with neither flash nor html5. I remember that posts on blogspot were generally readable. Nobody seemed to think converting blogspot to use flash as a presentation layer was a good idea. But today, we have recreated faux flash in the browser, and sure enough, blogspot uses it, resulting in about half the posts I read being nothing but blank pages.
The transition from “should I use flash for this?” to “should I use react+angular+jquery for this?” has somehow also resulted in the default answer flipping from “no” to “yes”. And I think that’s not merely the fault of bad developers. The messaging has switched from “flash if you must” to “html5 because you can”.
Good point, I see where you are coming from now. I too have noticed this, and I think it’s really a bad trend.
Just pointing out a technicality, but HTML5 should be used everywhere in my opinion, as it’s more semantic. HTML5 just gives us things like the
header,article,footer, andasidetags, which are much better than usingdivs.I think you mean to say that the message has changed from “flash if you must” to “React/Angular/<insert hip new js rendering framework> because you can”. ;)
Also blogspot is definitely the worst offender I’ve seen regarding all this, in fact, it’s been bad since they introduced their “modern” themes in 2008-ish. I’m pretty sure the failure rate for those pages on a bad connection are around 50%.
Yes, that’s a good clarification. “HTML5” is kind of a catch phrase for many things. Not just the defined standard features, but the frameworks built on top. For example, it’s accurate to say HTML5 gave us history.pushState(), much to my annoyance. But the feature is rarely used outside of these mongo frameworks. How do I best articulate my displeasure? Perhaps “modern” would be a better term, but I don’t really like overloading a term with sardonic meaning.
Yeah, I’m not completely sure what all you are opposed to as far as javascript frameworks are concerned, but for me, the thing I hate the most is not putting content in the HTML, and rendering with javascript. HTML+CSS were designed for displaying content, to reinvent the wheel in javascript is crazy IMO. I mean, content is static, HTML is static, CSS is static. Javscript is dynamic. Unless your content is also dynamic (like with a true web app such as Google docs), javascript rendering, to me at least, makes zero sense.
You should at least be able to view most pages on the web without JS. Not saying you have to be able to submit stuff and get full functionality, since some of that is impossible without JS, but you should definitely be able to READ a doggone blog post. Not to mention the fact that these folks are sort of killing themselves anyway since google bots don’t read content that’s not in the HTML.
Just realized I didn’t get around to actually answering your question. I think what you mean instead of “HTML5” is probably “Javascript Page Rendering” which is where all the content gets put on the page and formatted with javascript, instead of HTML and CSS, causing it to become extremely brittle and unusable with JS turned off or broken.
How well does view source work these days? The web page for a single tweet is 500K of html shell, plus another 500K of obfuscated minimized javascript. What can I learn from that?
BTW, your link doesn’t work. It just goes to the top of the page, not any particular comment.
On complex sites, opening the dev tools let’s you unobfuscate all that JS and organizes the HTML into a nice interactive tree. On simpler websites, view source definitely still works.