Adobe is starting to Embrace HTML5

Adobe has always been in the business of providing the best applications you can buy that help people communicate. They have Photoshop and Illustrator for creating imagery, Acrobat and InDesign for laying out content that’s ready for print, Premiere and After Effects for video/animation, Dreamweaver and Contribute for website design, and Flash is a great tool for creating interactivity & animation for websites in a way that web browsers without it simply can’t match. That is… until HTML5 included Canvas support.

Flash was created due to the user’s requests that the web should be able to do more than just serve up static images and text. This also needed to be provided in a way that didn’t result in a large file-size, because the majority of people online were still using slow dial-up Internet connections. These two things couldn’t be done with the capabilities that the web browsers provided on their own so Adobe decided to build the Flash platform that would be a plug-in for your web browser to extend it’s capabilities.

Over time, users came across different problems while using and developing for Flash. The issues that people experienced included crashing, inconsistent/confusing user interfaces, excessive computer resource usage (draining battery life), couldn’t be crawled by search engines, and others. This is fine as software gets better over time, but the problem that many people came back to is that Adobe has ownership over Flash, and they’re the ones that develop and make the improvements to it. Adobe listens to feedback from it’s users, but ultimately they would have the final say in what gets added & optimized in the next version.

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The open standard of HTML has a new version in the works that will include many capabilities that until now could only be done via Flash. HTML5 has a capability called Canvas that is what it sounds like. It’s an area of a website that can do pretty much anything the developer wants. There’s too many benefits to using this over Flash moving forward that I’ll have to make sure to cover them in a future article.

One move that Adobe made recently (that I couldn’t agree with more) added capabilities to the latest versions of their applications (Creative Suite 5) that utilize Canvas for displaying content on the web. This is something that until now would have been using Flash. They’ve demoed the ability of being able to export something made in Flash to Canvas, and sadly that doesn’t look like it’s going to make it to the shipping product yet.

Something that is going to be available as soon as Creative Suite 5 is released is the ability to take vector images created in Illustrator and simply paste them into a website. This means that you can zoom & resize the image, literally, as much as you want without any loss of quality/pixelation right on a website. They also are including a feature that allows you to tie data to the image. The example they gave was that they made a bar graph look exactly how they wanted it in Illustrator and simply tied a spreadsheet file to it. They then pasted it onto the website where they wanted it. If they needed to update the bar graph on the site, they would simply update the spreadsheet and the image would automatically update to match the spreadsheet. This is only a taste of what’s to come in terms of making things quicker and more manageable for those running websites, and a better experience to use for those viewing the site. Here’s a video of the demo they gave at a conference: