http://www.hongkiat.com/blog/48-excellent-html5-demos/

Granted, some of these demos are quite old, but nothing requiring interactivity (not navigation or video) works, apart from the “Ball Pool” demo. The issue seems to be that the browser has supremacy when trying to perform a dragging operation. The improved experience comes from BROWSING and video. In fact, teacherled.com is the only site that seems to have interacitve HTML 5 activities designed for the mobile browser. The implicaiton is that from a technology point of view, the mobile web will be essentially non-interactive, which means the end of free resources on mobile. To add to what you say about Apps, a £5 App will end up costing a multiple of that on average, as the current model of searching for resources means that it will take a while to find the resource you want.

With regards to the argument on performance between the technologies, it would be as well to watch this video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVjIsL8qwNw

I agree totally with what you say. HTML (5) is promising, but not ready yet, even though it is now the only web choice for mobile. When mobile moves into the classroom, this may well be the end of free resources.

Cas38

In regards to the HTML5 vs Flash Adobe seems to be hedging their bets a little and intending to support both but I don’t think it will be easy to create any means where we can write once and convert to both. Companies will probably produce both and charge more to cover it. Independents, like me, will just have to keep making choices.

It is a worry though that so many teachers have seen my last resource and probably think that it is a total dog’s dinner due to browser, OS, direction of the wind incompatibilities. Only to be used with iPad will be a label on all of my HTML5 stuff for the future.

Good luck!

Not only machine differences but browser differences exist. I find FIrefox to have the least pleasing rendering engine. IE9 and Safari produce the graphics as they should look, Firefox’s aren’t quite right showing less antialiasing and some graphical glitches. Although varying ones depending on the machine..

In regards to the comparison of Flash and HTML5 everything just depends it seems. Having an Android phone that can run Flash I can see why Apple decided against it as to be honest its performance is so bad its inclusion matters little to me although it was when I bought something I particularly wanted. The HTML5 clock however runs pretty good-just a little slow to pick up touch events. My comments on battery usage are based on what others have said and the fact that portable devices seem to be really struggling to keep up with Flash but are okay-ish with the clock.

The open source code is a problem but to be fair it isn’t much worse than with Flash. It is fairly trivial to decompile Flash and while it can be obfuscated swapping of graphics etc would allow illegal rebranding without too much worry. THe same is true with Javascript. I used the limejs framework for the clock resource (very nice to work with) and this uses Google Closure and hence the Google Closure Compiler which obfuscates the javascript as a side effect of increasing its efficency. Still it would be trivial to download and swap out graphics. (Note to whole world: please don’t.)

The situation at the moment is incredibly frustrating. While I understand the desire to move away from proprietary plug-ins it feels like we have taken a step backwards. I can no longer write once deploy anywhere. I also miss the power of Flash. On a desktop machine at least, Flash is capable of far more than HTML5, and it uses, in my opinion, a more powerful language. What should worry anyone who is providing online resources is suddenly realising one day that Flash player penetration has dropped to a small subsection of devices and that everything needs rewriting or a a whole swathe of users must be lost. This may never happen but the growth in the iPad makes it something we shouldn’t ignore either. For teacherLED it is just me and my free time so I can’t write a Flash and a HTML5 version as is perhaps ideal at the moment. Professional sites perhaps could but interestingly they aren’t. Releasing paid for apps seems to be the main way of addressing the iPad users. But this then means the days of free resources on line are numbered. (As a side point if the number of Education Authorities increase who filter out all advertisements in schools I can see this happening anyway – they need to stop and think about how the resources they use are free. )

So it seems that to fulfill the dream of a plugin free, non-proprietary, universal compatibility future we have to put up with a fragmented, poor performing present!

As I said in a tweet yesterday: Flash how I miss thee!

This is a very interesting article, and an interesting decision you have taken with your development. I wish you luck with HTML 5 and will be interested to see how you get on. I have been looking at HTML 5 as a solution for delivering interactively, but from the off, it obviously provides challenges for commercial development of interactive resources, as all of the source code is left open!!! (though it is apparently possible to obfuscate Javascript classes). I note your comments on the performance of the Flash Player in terms of power usage and battery life, but what I have found thus far is that viewing HTML 5 experiments causes massive processor and memory usage for various interactive operations. Your first clock example performs particularly poorly in FireFox 7 (Win XP), and while I understand that it is essentially v0.001, I am of the opinion that HTML5 is not yet a tool with which to create the learning experiences that we are striving for. That said, I hope you get somewhere with it.

Best of luck,

Cas

P.S. If you would like to discuss what I have seen so far and any links for HTML 5 material, you can send me an email.