HTML 5: The end of Flash and Silverlight? Not yet

Slowly but surely new features for the latest version of HTML are making their way into our browsers. Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, Chrome, IE 8 and Opera 9 all now including working examples of what we can expect when the full version is released. The question is will these new features exile existing technologies such as Adobe’s Flash Player and Microsoft Silverlight.

HTML 5 aims to fix something that has been lacking in previous versions of the markup language, Web Applications. At present third party plugins such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight and Sun Microsystems (soon to be Oracle) are used to create a rich multimedia interface on the web, HTML 5 aims to replicate this without having to use these third party plugins.

One of the new features in HTML 5 is the ability to add videos to your web page, much like the way you add an image, this will obviously cut out a large amount of time embedding flash in to your site. You can see an example of the new <video> tag here. (Only works in Firefox 3.5)

Even though the some features are available now HTML 5 won’t be fully rolled out for another two years or so, until then Flash, Silverlight and Java will still be the main port of call for all of your web application needs.

For a full list of HTML features, you can visit the W3C HTML 5 Overview page.