SPRING 2013
Adviser Update
Page 19A
Flash vs. HTML5
How a new technology can make your students’
websites available on all web devices
By Gary Clites
I
technology
Apple vs. Adobe
has been technology columnist for
Adviser Update for over a dozen
years. He served for over a decade
as president of the Maryland-DC
Scholastic Press Association,
received a Columbia Gold Key
Award in 2008, and was a 2004
Distinguished Adviser in the DJNF
National Journalism Teacher of the
Year program. There is an archive
of his articles on his web site,
www.garyclites.com. He can be
reached at [email protected].
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P06.V53.I4
whether the web hosting sites
we choose are optimized to
take advantage of the new
HTML5 architecture. If we
want our sites to be viewable
on iPhones, iPads, PS3’s,
etc., we need to choose hosts
built to process our content in
HTML5. How do we do that?
A search of the FAQ’s of most
web hosts should answer that
question. Many top student
publications are doing that
research, and, according to
postings on the JEA’s journalism teacher listserv, some
sites have already moved
from one host to another to
take advantage of HTML5.
This new web technology
offers student publications
the ability to reach a much
larger audience with websites
that match the expectations
of today’s new media users.
A little research will allow our
students to take advantage of
the power of the new HTML5
technology. The advantages
of HTML5 make that research
and the move to a potential
new host well worth the effort.
cyan
suddenly didn’t work on their
computers.
Finally, more and more
devices and browsers are
incompatible with Flash. Aside
from iPhones and iPads,
other mobile phones, gaming
consoles like the X-Box 360
and PS3, and most TV-based
browsers include little Flash
support. Even some Windowsbased computers using newer
64-bit browsers have Flash
compatibility problems. What
then is the alternative for creating animations and hosting
video on the Web?
Many video and animation sites are moving quickly
to a newer technology called
HTML5. Put simply, HTML5 is
a new addition to the language
designed to address Flash’s
shortcomings by supporting
animations, video, etc. Major
sites we use like Slideshare
and SchoolTube have recently
adopted HTML5 and moved
away from Flash. YouTube,
Gary Clites
magenta
who chose to use it. For a
hardcore product developer
like Jobs, that was its main
sin.
Flash has other flaws.
It has very poor Search
Engine Optimization (SEO).
Essentially, Flash is not readable by search engines like
Google, Yahoo and Bing. You
can embed meta tags for web
crawlers to read, but content on a fully Flash-enabled
website is nearly invisible to
web crawlers. Flash has difficult maintenance issues.
An end-user (you and I on
our computers) must constantly keep Flash updated
in order to see everything on
the Web. This became a big
issue back in February when a
new, destructive Flash-borne
virus hit the net. To fight it,
Adobe pushed several Flash
updates in a row over the next
few weeks. Users who didn’t
update suddenly found that
Flash content all over the web
the primary video hosting site
on the net, is currently running
a Beta version in HTML5, indicating an intention to move to
the new technology.
What does this mean to
web content creators like
journalism students across
the country? The great thing
is that there is really no need
to choose between Flash and
HTML5 in content creation.
HTML5 is designed to work
with both Flash and its own
content. “Interoperability” is
the cool keyword for this new
technology. Both allow for
integration of animations and
videos into websites. The two
technologies are identical in
their capabilities, but differ in
their shortcomings.
Essentially, HTML5 solves
all the problems with Flash. It
offers an open architecture for
web creators, is crawlable for
search engines, is compatible
with pretty much all devices,
and offers good maintenance/
updating for end users.
How, then, do students take
advantage of HTML5’s new
capabilities? The truth is that a
decade into the Flash revolution, few student websites are
created by writing raw code.
Rather, we create sites using
WYSIWYG (What You See Is
What You Get) templated site
builders at various web hosting sites. Whether we choose
to host our sites at GoDaddy.
com, Edublogs, Wordpress
or at the American Society of
News Editors’ HSJ.org, almost
all student publications build
our sites using simple dragand-drop technology.
The key question we need
answered at this point is
yellow
n April 2010, a war started
in web development when
Apple launched the iPad
1 without the ability to read
Adobe Flash, the standard
video, audio and animation
plugin across the Internet.
Apple had already begun
blocking development
using Flash on its other portable devices, especially the
iPhone, but it was the popularity of the iPad that highlighted
the question of whether the
Apple decision might lead to
the death and/or replacement
of Flash. Today, developers
of web content, like our students, are dealing with that
question and whether to move
to a newer technology called
HTML5.
When Adobe Flash (originally Macromedia Flash) was
introduced over a decade ago,
it was a revolution that forever
changed the web, bringing
television-like animation to
even the simplest sites. If you
remember before Flash, web
pages were dull affai