HTML5 And Flash Can Work Together Insists Adobe Evangelist [Video]
Flash and HTML5 are hot topics in the online world right now. We’ve heard plenty about how more smartphoneswill get Flash, how performance mightnot be what users expectand how mainstream sites arelooking to alternatives, and of course there’s Apple’s ongoing reluctance to add Flash functionality to their mobile devices. MeanwhileHTML5is getting plenty of positive press, and most recently Microsoft have announcedfull support for the technology in IE9. Is there room for both to live together in harmony, however? “Adobe platform evangelist” Serge Jespers reckons so, and he’sthrown together the codeto demonstrate it.Video demo after the cut
In Jespers' example, HTML5 is used to pull out geolocation data that can then be fed to a Flash application, even though only Adobe AIR has access to geolocation APIs. This takes advantage of HTML5’s geolocation API, that can use not only true-GPS but WiFi and cellular base-station triangulation depending on what the device itself has access to.
The end result is an app which is written in Flash but which – when used in a fully HTML5 compliant browser like Firefox 3.5 – can access location information using an ExternalInterface call. It works on both desktop systems and – if you have the Flash 10.1 beta, which obviously Jespers has – the Google Nexus One’s WebKit-based browser; you cantry it yourself hereor check out the details in the video below.
Is Flash dead at the hands of HTML5? No, certainly not – and we didn’t need this app to tell us that – but paired together they make for even more interesting applications. If anything, it comes down to how browser developers add in support for the technologies; if one or both isn’t stable then users will have a bad experience, no matter what the content they’re accessing is coded in.
[ThanksAndy!]
