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SlideShare Ditches Flash, Rebuilds Site In HTML5 154

Frankie70 writes "SlideShare has ditched Adobe Flash technology entirely, and rebuilt its website using the HTML5 markup language. This means that SlideShare is now viewable on every kind of mobile device, from iPads to iPhones to Android devices and beyond."
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SlideShare Ditches Flash, Rebuilds Site In HTML5

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  • Questions (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ledow ( 319597 )

    1) Who the hell are SlideShare?

    2) Why would I care?

    3) What makes it frontpage material for nerds?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by jedidiah ( 1196 )

      There is also the issue of content. Just because you use HTML5, it doesn't mean that all devices will magically be able to use your site. The video you are pushing still needs to be something that the clients can decode. This just avoids the "Steve won't let iPhones run Flash" problem.

      • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

        by Pieroxy ( 222434 )

        Sure. But you can always serve the proper video to the proper user agent. This is no rocket science.

        • You don't need to sniff the user agent. The html5 video tag has provisions for sites to supply multiple formats and allow the browser to select the compatible one.

          • by Pieroxy ( 222434 )

            A "user agent" is a client of the HTTP protocol. This is the terminology used in the RFCs. I never proposed to sniff the "User-agent" field of an http request.

          • The html5 video tag has provisions for sites to supply multiple formats and allow the browser to select the compatible one.

            But does the HTML5 video tag provide for sites to supply multiple sizes of one format, such as 1080p, 720p, 480p, 360p, or 240p, based on the available bandwidth, processing power, and screen resolution? For a handheld device with a small screen and a slow, capped Internet connection, you might want to provide the low-detail version of a video.

      • Exactly. My Nokia C5 doesn't support HTML 5, but it does support flash. So all they've really done is abandon one set of affordable phones and added support for a different set of very expensive phones. Why not have some sort of hybrid implementation where they detect the capabilities of your browser and use whatever features are available and then fall back on that. It's a site for sharing powerpoint presentations. I'm pretty sure you could support 99% of powerpoint presentations with HTML 4, no javascr
        • Exactly. My Nokia C5 doesn't support HTML 5, but it does support flash.

          No, it supports Flash Lite 3.0 - did the site from TFA even work on your phone?

      • What video? Or are you another person who thinks that HTML5 is the video tag and nothing more? Slideshare is a site for sharing slides. They don't share video, they share pages of formatted text. They have greater layout constraints than HTML traditionally supports, because they want the slides to appear in your browser just as they appeared on the screen.
      • And not everything uses HTML5. Sure, not everything can use Flash either, but the notion that HTML5 makes everything universal is naive.

      • There is also the issue of content. Just because you use HTML5, it doesn't mean that all devices will magically be able to use your site. The video you are pushing still needs to be something that the clients can decode. This just avoids the "Steve won't let iPhones run Flash" problem.

        Stupid Apple hating Flash Mobster. RTFA - "video"?

        SlideShare, the website for sharing PowerPoint presentations and other documents, has had a major makeover.

        Another perk is that the website is now 30 percent faster and its files take up 40 percent less space than they used to.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Apparently it's a "website for sharing PowerPoint presentations and other documents".

      As to why anyone would care, I've no idea.

    • Re:Questions (Score:5, Informative)

      by samael ( 12612 ) * <Andrew@Ducker.org.uk> on Wednesday September 28, 2011 @05:45AM (#37537768) Homepage

      1) They host slide decks from presentations. I seem them being used by a wide variety of people, including lots of tech presentations.
      2) Do you care about presentations, or HTML 5? If not, you wouldn't.
      3) Because lots of us nerds care about HTML 5 and technical presentations.

    • What are the downsides or issues involved in building a general purpose html5 website today, for public consumption?

      I'm not talking about a site which will use the canvas tag etc but something that should work fine on older browsers - how do older browsers react to doctypes developed after the browser was created?

      I was looking at doing this for an upcoming project, specifically to use data annotations on tags (if you look at Facebook, they use non-standard data annotations on tags) but haven't come to a de

      • by Inda ( 580031 )
        I assume this is the SlideShare in question: http://www.slideshare.net/

        The front landing page looks excellent. The CSS hasn't loaded and the page looks like something from 1998 - excellent, have a bonus point. None of the images display either, but I'm guessing the CDN is blocked by my company's nanny software - it's no big deal, I used to block 3rd party images back in the days.

        The first featured slideshow looks exactly the same as the landing page. No CSS and no images. If only all presentations could loo
    • by kikito ( 971480 )

      1) SlideShare is to presentations what youtube is to videos.

      2) It depends. If you don't know what Slideshare is, and don't know the difference between html5 and flash, then definitively you should not care.

      3) Someone submitted it and someone else promoted it to the front page. There's a faq here: http://slashdot.org/faq [slashdot.org]

    • 2 and 3.

      It has HTML5.
      It says iPad.
      It says iPhone.
      It says Android.

      You don't get it. Content is being delivered via markup language!!!1! This could revolutionize the print indus.....er.... wait, what?

    • Agree; slashvertisments are showing up more and more on this site and its a real shame.

      Looking at slideshare is not very encouraging- their site is covered with intrusive adverts and the comments indicate that the latest presentations don't seem to work on all browsers - with navigation buttons missing on the latest browsers.

      I'm not sure that people will choose to use their service above http://prezi.com/ [prezi.com] the clear leaders in this field.

      • OK, yeah, it's a slashvertisement.

        But I'm not affiliated with Slideshare, and it's handy to be notified of this news.

        I've sort of put up with Slideshare because so many tech presentations (re: Drupal, PHP, and a bunch of other things) are on Slideshare.

        The fact that they're HTML5 now gives me reason to explore it further.

        Regarding Prezi, I don't know how it's the leader in this category. Slideshare's Alexa rank is an order of magnitude better than Prezi's, so more people are using Slideshare.

    • by bazorg ( 911295 )

      1) Slideshare is kind of like flickr, but for presentation files instead of single photos. Useful for sharing that kind of file without requiring an installed client software. Good for SEO and to publish the presentations nearly in the same way they were made with your favourite office suite, instead of adapting them to HTML for publishing on the www.

      2) YMMV

      3) there's a significant amount of content there that will no longer require adobe flash. It's therefore more likely to be made available for ever and e

  • Slidewho? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Wednesday September 28, 2011 @05:55AM (#37537812) Homepage

    Wake me up when youtube ditches Flash.

    • by Pieroxy ( 222434 )

      Wake me up when youtube ditches Flash.

      Hello? Are you there? It's time to wake up. Type youtube.com on an iDevice to see it at work.

      • Have they ditched flash for their main general website? No. The only reason they don't use it for apple devices is they had no choice. Thats entirely different to making a voluntary decision to bin it completely. I don't think its me that needs to wake up to reality.

        • by Hadlock ( 143607 )

          Youtube has had desktop HTML5 support (i.e. replaces flash) for at least a year, probably closer to two at this point. I've been using it for that period because my old N470 atom netbook (linux) struggles with full screen flash video, but runs HTML5 video acceptably in chrome. You can enable it somewhere deep inside the ever-changing youtube interface.

          • How is that relevant in a discussion about ditching Flash? Unless youtube turns OFF flash support, make HTML5 the default, or even do something as basic as market HTML5 to the general population the thing we are still embedding into other pages is very much going to remain Flash.

            • Actually the embed code is smarter than that. It embeds the most supported player your browser has. Uninstall Flash and check it out, if you have support for WebM or H.264. If not you will want to keep Flash around - which is still the most installed standard video player on the market.

          • by Viol8 ( 599362 )

            And isn't it wonderful? It only works with certain browsers and you have to install yet another plugin for the video codec which rather defeats the point of not using flash in the first place. Thanks, but I hope they stick with flash.

            • Thing is, Youtube's video player is just about the only video player on the web that (almost) always works. The other ones do dumb things like stop loading when you pause it. (It should load up the entire video behind the scenes, and have it ready for you when you hit play.)

          • by Rich0 ( 548339 )

            You can enable it somewhere deep inside the ever-changing youtube interface.

            And then re-enable it about once every two weeks when for whatever reason it forgets your setting.

            I run chromium on linux without a flash plugin, and youtube works fine in html5, but I CONSTANTLY have to re-enable it. That is a major annoyance.

            Look, Google makes youtube. Google makes chrome. Can't they figure out whether the one works with the other and just use html5 by default?

        • by Flipao ( 903929 )
          You do need to wake up to reality, If they ditched Flash the videos wouldn't play on older browsers, that would leave most users unable to access the site.

          Not to mention the fact that HTML5 is still being developed, to drop Flash support overnight in favour of an incomplete technology is reckless at best.

          People should really read up on these issues instead of parroting sermons preached by interested parties.
  • SlideShare is now viewable on every kind of mobile device

    As long as they support that very flavor of HTML5 which, in turn, is still a draft!

    • by Pieroxy ( 222434 )

      SlideShare is now viewable on every kind of mobile device

      As long as they support that very flavor of HTML5 which, in turn, is still a draft!

      It is still a draft. So? What does this mean? We shouldn't endorse it? Especially now that ALL browsers support it?

      • by Flipao ( 903929 )

        SlideShare is now viewable on every kind of mobile device

        As long as they support that very flavor of HTML5 which, in turn, is still a draft!

        It is still a draft. So? What does this mean? We shouldn't endorse it? Especially now that ALL browsers support it?

        You *could* endorse it, I wouldn't say *should* because changes in the spec might make the version supported by ALL browsers OBSOLETE overnight. We're years away from a finalized standard.

        • by Pieroxy ( 222434 )

          What the fuck does anyone care about the standard? What we want is a technology with a sufficiently large install base so that it has a meaning to actually use it. HTML5 is this. AND it has a standard backing it up, which is an added bonus more or less guaranteeing a common set of features & API across all browsers

          If they change the standard overnight (which will never happen, you know it) my code won't stop working... so why should I care? Why should anyone care? You really think IE, Firefox, Chrome, O

          • by Flipao ( 903929 )

            What the fuck does anyone care about the standard?.

            Pretty much stopped reading there, IE6 was developed by people who didn't give a fuck about standards and it set the web back at least half a decade. I'll leave you to figure out why they're necessary.

            • by Pieroxy ( 222434 )

              Ok, my sentence was wrong, and it should have read "What the fuck does anyone care about the draft status of the standard?"

              My point was that the standard is there, it is followed by ALL browser manufacturers. The fact that it is a draft is brought up so often that it gets on my nerves. Apologies.

  • When I go to the site, I'm still getting "Flash Player 9 (or above) is needed to view presentations."

  • This is good news. No need to use Flash for presenting what is basically static pages with perhaps an animation here and there. Using HTML will make it more accessible. They mention mobile devices, but this will also help search engines and people with disabilities.

    • Correction, it might be good news, and it might be more accessible, IF they've done it right.
      First cut with a new language/framework for development, and that's a big IF.

      HTML5 won't magically fix things - it is perfectly possible to write accessible Flash and inaccessible "HTML5".

      Case in point - I recently found that scridb (www.scribd.com) now has a new "HTML 5" interface - for which read HTML+lots of flaky javascript - replacing flash.
      The new interface:
      - was inaccessible and unfriendly, bro

  • I can post "Ding Dong the witch is dead. Which old witch? The proprietary cpu eating battery draining witch!"
    Sooner or later anyway...
  • Well, I just signed up (yay slashvertisement!) and uploaded a very simple powerpoint slide.

    Result: Running chrome I still see the slide being run on Flash. I have looked around and found no immediate way of activating the HTML5 mode, even if I can see the HTML5 presentations in the slideshare frontpage just fine.

    Maybe it runs on flash only if it detects a flash plugin, but why tout the HTML5 mode this way if they are going to default to flash anyway?

  • Shouldn't this read, "replaced Flash with HTML Canvas"?

  • That I tested Firefox 3.6.22 (I refuse to use the newer versions since they mess with Java processes.) and that scored 179/450 on the HTML5 test.

    Then I tried IE 8. That got a dismal 69/450

    Trying Google Chrome v15.0.874.51 beta-m yields a 328/450.

    So if two of the three browsers are up to current version and the highest score is 328/450 then how the hell do they expect people to be able to visit HTML5 sites reliably?

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