Comments Off// Posted in Online Tools, Web 2.0, Web services by Jeremy Rue on 05.07.10.

At the Web 2.0 Expo, I had an opportunity to check out a few sessions on the cool new features of HTML5.

Let me just say this: HTML5 is going to change everything. The Web will become amazingly beautiful in a few years, all because of this new standard. But, more on that in a future post.

I am a Flash instructor at UC Berkeley’s journalism school, and a few people have asked me about my thoughts over the whole Flash vs. HTML5 debate. For me, it comes down to just one thing – an IDE.

For the non-techies out there, an IDE (or integrated development environment) is a software program that helps people build things, like websites. More importantly, it helps non-programmers create amazing content on the Web using a drag-and-drop interface. This is what Flash currently does.

I teach Flash to journalism students who have no programming experience at all. After six classes, students are capable of creating some very creative stuff that would take months – more likely years – of study to do with a coding language like JavaScript.

A Berkeley student produced this Flash project for the Washington Post.

Flash opens a whole world of interactive multimedia to the common person. Anyone with a little time on their hands can learn to use a software program like Flash and take part in the creation of beautiful content.

So, let’s come back to HTLM5. What many laymen don’t realize is that the best parts of HTML5 are actually done using JavaScript. The “HTML” part of HTML5 is only a really tiny part of all of the new stuff it will be capable of doing. HTML5 includes some new <video> and <audio> tags, but that alone won’t produce the amazing things everyone has been demoing. For that, you will need a real JavaScript coder.

A part of the Web 2.0 expo this week included a sit down discussion with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch, where he hinted that Adobe would build an IDE for creating HTML5 content. I suspect Lynch is referring to DreamWeaver, a software program that in my opinion hasn’t lived up to its potential.

What Adobe, or another company, needs to do is build a superlative timeline-based tool for HTML5. If a company really brought HTML5 capabilities to the masses, it would offer huge potential to a number of industries – especially ours.

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