The debate is starting to get confusing. It’s like schoolyard bickering all over again. Apple doesn’t like Adobe, Google doesn’t like Apple, Adobe and Google are buddying up, YouTube is stuck in the middle. And Steve Jobs rants at everyone.

The latest development in the HTML5 vs. Flash debate was YouTube rewriting its mobile site entirely in HTML5 – after criticising it in their official blog. This was happy news for iPhone and iPad users, but the rest of us are confused. Who’s in the right and what’s the future of these web technologies?

We asked web solutions consultant George Munroe to explain. First, the most important question: Is Steve Jobs wrong?

“Steve Jobs is seldom wrong! But this is not really a personal crusade. Steve is reiterating what a lot of people have felt and expressed over recent years. Flash may have it’s place, but it’s not conveying information in a networked environment.”

Key differences

Training people to make effective use of websites, George is an enthusiastic advocate for HTML5. Its strengths lie in its ability to compliment a well structured and coherent internet. In terms of building websites, George advises against Flash.

“Flash is a multimedia production system; HTML5 is a web authoring language”, he explains.

“Flash can produce impressive multimedia effects on screen to impress (or perhaps entertain) the viewer; HTML5 can produce well structured web documents that can communicate well structured content and associated metadata to the viewer and software agents. ”

Towards a better structured web

George’s advice is to use each technology for what they’re best at. When it comes to web pages, HTML5 is the best discipline, he says. It might not yet produce as exciting graphical output as Flash can, but according to George, it’s actually not falling too short.

“Used with CSS3 it’s possible to achieve simple but effective and impressive multimedia effects on screen without sacrificing any of the underlying well-specified content structure,” George explains.

Compared to its predecessors HTML5 is a leap towards more thoroughly indexed web.

“Most importantly, HTML5 brings consolidation of a markup standard. HTML5 is truer and more precise than preceding versions in identifying the structural elements of a web page; style and presentation-related parts have been removed and are implemented using CSS (as it should always have been).”

So what were the arguments again?

With their demos of Flash constantly crashing, Adobe seems to have lost ground in the debate. Apple in turn seems to be sticking to its Flash-is-”buggy”-and-redundant argument.

Google’s answer to this came recently in the official YouTube blog; Flash might be in the beginning of its end, but HTML5 is still far from being ready to take over online videos.

“Today, Adobe Flash provides the best platform for YouTube’s video distribution requirements, which is why our primary video player is built with it”, John Harding, a YouTube software engineer, said after long set of techy arguments.

So at the moment it looks like everyone will just have to get along in the schoolyard. Sticking to what they’re best at. Fat chance of that happening!

Case study

Gary Robson from North East digital company Industrial Strength, outlined some of the possibilities and difficulties of using HTML5 from a web developer’s point of view. Read more…

HTML5 in practice