As HTML5 Gets 2014 Final Date, Flash Floods Mobile

CWmike writes "Those curious about the final release date for the hotly debated HTML5 need wonder no more: the W3C plans to finalize the standard by July 2014, the consortium said on Monday. 'This is the first time we've been able to answer people's questions of when it will be done,' said W3C's Ian Jacobs. 'More and more people from more and more industries are asking when it will be done. They require stability in the standard and very high levels of interoperability.' Meanwhile, as Apple dismisses the value of the Flash Player in favor of HTML5 for its smartphones and tablets, Adobe said on Monday that it predicts 600% growth in the number of smartphones having the Flash 10.1 Player installed in 2011, reaching 132 million smartphones and more than 50 tablet models with either the player installed or available for download. For the six months following the launch of Flash 10.1, more than 20 million smartphones were shipped or upgraded with it."

Licensing

[bcmm]

Don't forget that Flash on mobiles is basically a scam: Flash is only free of charge for "computers" (RTFEULA for definition). Adobe is charging a license fee to mobile device manufacturers who want to include Flash player. AFAIK, that even includes updates, meaning that Flash updates stop for devices that are no longer supported by a manufacturer, like the N900. Of course, Adobe can hold people to ransom over paid updates by making sure that content created with their newest authoring tools won't play on old versions...

HTML5 vs HTML and W3C vs WHATWG

[no known priors]

So, just to clarify for all you people who haven't realized yet, there are two different groups working on HTML at the moment.

• The W3C HTML Working Group, which is putting together the final HTML 5 spec. (Which will consist of various things that have at least two independent implementations.)
• The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group is working on various new HTML stuff, and is getting new stuff into browsers as soon as possible. Experimenting with new tags and so on.

For all you professional corporate/big org types, I strongly suggest continuing to work with HTML 4.01 Strict (and/or XHTML 1.1 as appropriate). OK, you could go with HTML 5 if you really want to, but the difference is, that it isn't stable yet. And is it really sensible/professional to create corporate/big org pages that might not get touched for five years if the "standard" you are basing the pages on, isn't even standard?

For your personal website, use whatever you want. But if you aren't using features of the new HTML5, I suggest you don't use it. (Personally, I think the new form stuff is awesome, but haven't noticed much else that I would use as yet.)