COMMENTS
We'll see how fast the major browsers embrace HTML5 and how quickly the new standards-compliant browsers spread among users. It still amazes me how many people are still on IE6. Maybe MS, Mozilla, Safari, Opera etc. should actually do some marketing to try to upgrade everyone to a common level. That would really help a lot of web designers. Hopefully some entrepreneurial developers will come out with great conversion tools from HTML4/XHTML to HTML5. That would help.
Kipp, fantastic recap of HTML5. As you know this was one of the better take aways for me as a B2B marketer during SXSW this year. Your post should be read by everyone in marketing as they get prepared for HTML5.
/kff
Fantastic article. The timing was perfect. I've been looking for a clear explanation of HTML 5 and it's implications for marketers, but to no avail. Thank you!
One question though, when HTML 5 is released, will all browsers and authoring tools upgrade as well to recognize this new language? How about Hubspot?
Thanks again!
@Brian - The adoption of HTML by browsers is one of the unknown factors. As browsers begin to adopt HTML5 web-based software companies will likely then begin to adopt. HTML5 is something that our team is keeping a close eye on here at HubSpot.
Great post Kipp. Best explanation of HTML5 marketing benefits that I've seen.
Did anyone else notice the HTML5 hand picture has 6 fingers?
Part of me hopes that Apple never makes up with Adobe which will make HTML 5 that much stronger. So far HTML 5 seems to be better way of doing things then Adobe. Will see what happens. Great post btw!
Great and timely post as this is the next industry "standard" peaking curiousity and gaining momentum. Personally I believe HTML5 will have a quicker impact on mobile devices particularly for video viewing and sharing than it will on traditional desktop web browsing. I don't think we'll see mass adoption of HTML5 specifically with online video for at least 2 years...possibly longer. One of the biggest reasons is Microsoft's Internet Explorer doesn't support HTML5 and doesn't seem to be planning to until it's release of IE9. Last I heard IE9 is slated to be released in Fall of 2011...but we know how that goes. With nearly 40% of internet users still using some version of Internet Explorer between IE6 and IE8...I think HTML5 is still a ways from gaining mass adoption but I look forward to seeing it and the changes it will bring to web browsing.
We are currently building a new website for a client and they want a flash drive. What about HTML5?
You all amaze me.
Apple's exclusion of Flash from the iPad has nothing to do with loving open standards. On the iPad and iPhone, Apple maintains the most closed operating system on the planet. What they wish to avoid is sharing their device with another app platform or media format. The web's first App platform and secure video distribution format: Flash.
If the plugins are actually the problem, then we can be happy that Apple has finally come around and will be retiring Quicktime. (sarcasm)
No, quicktime is not going away, and neither is SilverLight or Windows Media. These have nothing to do with the iPad or HTML5.
What we have with the iPad is a net neutrality issue.
Apple wants to say iPad has the web. iPad has enough power to display the web including flash but they are tricking you all into supporting their effort to deliver the web, but only with the video that they authorize.
HTML is a beautiful standard and HTML5 is the product of a lot of hard work.
Flash is an accomplished veteran of the internet revolution with a built in community and body of historic content that will not be abandoned.
Adobe as the publisher of DreamWeaver, Fireworks, and a ton of other standards-dependent authoring tools has been pushing the edge of what HTML can do for years and will continue to support it wholeheartedly.
Apple has no right saying that the reason iPad is missing 80% of the video published online is because they believe in html5. It is because they don't want to put the player on the device and open it up to Hulu et. al.
One day this will be illegal. This is no way to run a business or care for competition in the marketplace. It goes way too far and you should all feel like you've been had. Because you have.
What is valuable about all of this writing you are all doing, is the historic record. When the day comes that most of the web uses HTML5's video tag, and Adobe is still there providing the best authoring tools available for multimedia content, it will be clear that you were used as a tool of Apple's PR in a practice that will by that time have been made illegal.
To artificially incite polarization in the social media will one day be a criminal act. The cost is too high. I'm sure you all have a good head on your shoulders but apple's made a fool of you.
All to explain why Hulu doesn't work on my iPad and make me buy content from Apple, without telling me the truth.
@sid - Thanks for your comment. You make some good points. To be clear we are not supporting Apple's choice to not adopt Flash, instead we are trying to help marketers understand that HMTL5 is going to be a way to reach consumers that use Apple devices.
Thanks everyone for your comments!
Kipp, awesome article. This was my first time hearing about HTML5 and I'm really looking forward to it, especially considering you mention that Hubspot will likely adopt it...Anything to make design easier and better for the common business owner....Also, I just wanted to compliment you on your ability here to write this article in such a way that anyone, at pretty much any level, could understand it. Thanks again.
I agree with Marcus. This was my first time hearing about HTML5, too. I like how you made it easy to quickly scan yet still understand the benefits from a marketing standpoint. I find the potential exciting and look forward to hearing more.
What will HTML5 mean to content management systems - like Wordpress? Is this site built on Wordpress? I imagine template developers will build in HTML5 tags to optimize for SEO. What do you think?
@Sid: Please bear in mind that right now almost no mobile devices run Flash acceptably (Adobe themselves have been unable to ship the 10.1 Flash player which allegedly will work on mobile devices, and have just delayed it yet again); whether it be Android, WinMobile, or Apple's iPhone/iPad/iPod, they're all Flash-free (like many others, I consider this a feature). Video services like YouTube, Vimeo, and, yes, Hulu, are all in the process of offering up HTML5 video to user agents that can support it, meaning Hulu will work on an iPad shortly (http://www.macgasm.net/2010/02/11/everyones-favourite-video-streaming-service-hulu-going-html5/). So if you could expand on what exactly is "illegal" here, that would be great. Is it that Apple can't support an as-yet-unpublished Flash player? I'll go out on a limb, although it's not a very far one, and suggest that IF Flash get support on Android and Google ChromeOS and any number of popular mobile devices, and IF it works well, and customers really do find that they miss it, Apple will find a way to add it. At the moment, though, and I do say this as someone who has authored a lot of Flash and Shockwave content, I'm actually relieved that content created for screen/mouse/keyboard doesn't automatically work on touchscreen environments, whether they be Apple's or someone else's. To me, that's like trying to play an 8track on a cd player: they're just different.
HTML5, in the short term, is a bit of a fork in the road. You can adopt it, but not all browsers support it today. Some HTML5 causes the Safari on iPad to crash, for example.
In the medium term, the compatibility issues will go away as Safari is stabilized against all of the troublesome use cases. At least, I hope so. Flash CS5 will let you export legacy FLAs into HTML5 - hopefully Apple doesn't see fit to block this as well :)
@James perhaps I was a bit dramatic, but it is a dramatic issue. Normally we don't leave plugins behind at the device level because other plugins show up. They die off along the curve of waning user interest. In the case of Flash, if we leave the player behind then we loos the early web. A ton of content and stupid animations that gave us a chuckle at work, back when the web was new. To target our history like that is not good business. The first rule of popular culture is "give them what they want" and that drives the market. According to Adobe millions of iPhones unsuccessfully try to install flash every day. The pattern of denial quickly becomes a net neutrality issue. Why should they be allowed to represent their device in the market as a device that provides access to the Internet if they are not.
The flash player for video has been available on the htc android platform for almost a year. It began with the launch of the hero. That's an example of an open platform hardware provider working with adobe to deliver the web to their users. Why should Apple be able to represent that it provides Internet access when it has made no similar good faith effort to provide users of it's mobile products with a complete web experience? It is being argued in the field, and quite easily, that they are trying to eat Adobe's lunch and are not going through the proper channel of providing a competitive product for the consumer to decide, but using other means to manipulate the outcome. That's not cool. As consumers we should be able to vote with our money and behavior, not have our behavior controlled arbitrarily by a redacted Internet presented in the market as the "future" Internet. The devices that seek to support the internet we have should have the competitive advantage according to the trends but they are being interrupted, millions per day. Apple's response to the inquiry should be:
"flash is an important medium for millions of artists and content creators. It's content is consumed by billions of web users every day, it's important for Apple to deliver on our claim that safari on the iPhone and iPad is like surfing the the web in Safari on the desktop. When Adobe submits a player that meets our standard we will approve it."
We get something different from them and it's not good news. Is RatherGood.com going to redo the dancing kittens in html5? We might loose them in the war for video and they are just as valid a part of the internet as whitehouse.org or the wayback machine at archive.org
This looks like it is a net neutrality issue and an anti-competitive behavior issue. If adobe and apple were my kids I'd sit them down and give a long talk about sharing and playing well with others. Both of them.
@Sid: I fear we're drifting off topic here, and as someone with more than a passing interest in history and culture, I completely agree with you about the problems of the memory hole: is Flash the VHS to html5's DVD? Not yet. I do note, however, that no one is howling over the absence of good ol' regular Shockwave on any mobile device at all, nor Adobe's lack of interest in Director generally; how many classic game sites built around what were and are some pretty impressive 3D and multiplayer games are going to be lost on the mobile web? (Parenthetical insertion: I read "internet" very generously in all the PR stuff from all companies: Apple may say the iPhone brings you the "whole internet", but of course they're using "internet" to mean "most of the web and some email", not, you know, ftp or gopher or usenet or any of those other things, not to mention other plugins like Silverlight, Windows Media, etc, none of which, again, no one's howling over.)
But on that note, should we be preserving old browsers too? I mean, should Adobe really guarantee that the hokey Flash widget you authored with Flash 2 is still going to run the same in the 10.1 player as it did back in '98? Should websites created in html3 require Netscape 4 to display? This is one of the biggest hurdles we have in getting away from Internet Explorer 6, that there are so many legacy websites that, for good or ill, are so optimized for that browser alone that users can't or won't upgrade.
Back on track, I'm looking at html5 and at long last decent mobile browsing experiences as the most exciting part of web development right now, and am sad that, let's face it, it will be years before it's widely available, with Microsoft only now saying Internet Explorer 9 will support some of it. Realistically, then, there's going to be whole spectrum of web experiences for the next little while: a full html5 experience for those browsers that support it, a reduced mobile experience, a fallback IE experience, and, bringing up the rear, a whole lot of lousy, html3 crappy and crufty sites that haven't and won't be updated ever. Such is life. With every technical innovation, we gain something, and we lose something, and it's usually only with a great deal of hindsight that we see what those things were. I still have vinyl disks that have never been put on CD, and many CDs that will likely never make the leap to digital distribution; many books will never be epublished, many movies and tv shows will never be iTuned. At the moment I have no tv, no DVD player, no stereo, and I use a Mac for everything, and I can absolutely see a date not too far away when internal DVD players and writers are dropped just like floppy disks were, and I'll be a little screwed at that point. But no one owes me an upgrade (except the federal government, but I'm Canadian, and we kind of expect everything from our gov't).
On the very-off-topic subject of "bad faith", though, I think Apple has actually been very generous to Adobe, and has given them many years to get a well-performing, stable, Flash player just on the Mac desktop, and Adobe hasn't pulled it off. It's much like Microsoft with IE7 when it came out five years after IE6, and they tried to woo back developers who had abandoned IE for what I hope is the now-dominant web standards movement. No one took MS seriously, and I sympathize with many of the engineers who are now trying to make a good product who are hampered with this legacy. I wish Adobe had a better track record, and maybe Macromedia would have, but if they could compellingly show how the Mac OS player was stable, fast, and a good citizen, as it were, then maybe I'd see their complaints now in a different light. Still, Flash is primarily used for three things on the web: games, videos, and advertisements, and of those, I insist games would need to be rebuilt for touchscreen interfaces anyways, videos have alternative delivery mechanisms, and ads, well, I don't miss those....
If Adobe wants a place on the iPhone and iPad (and of course they do, as no self-respecting website hasn't been created in large part with Photoshop, Fireworks, and Illustrator), as many have noted, what web developers could really use is a good, integrated development environment for html5 web apps that combined known libraries like jQuery and (just maybe) pastrykit. Why in the three years since the iPhone was revealed Adobe hasn't released an iDreamweaver or something, I honestly can't imagine, because my goodness, that could be a great tool in the migration away from the static web and basic CMS tools towards robust web app development. (Coda, I'm betting on you....)