- The Canvas Challenge to Flash
- Images on a Canvas
- What the Future Holds
What the Future Holds
The HTML5 video and canvas elements together represent a strong challenge to Adobe Flash, the established platform for delivering video and interactive content over the web. It is a long-term challenge because Flash isn't going away anytime soon. Its installed base is too large, especially considering in-house corporate applications tied to legacy versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Flash also has Digital Rights Management (DRM), an important area that won't likely be addressed in the HTML5 specification for several more years.
Over the long term, however, the open HTML5 standard will provide more opportunities for web developers to build fun, creative applications. To get a sense of where this is going, search the web for "HTML5 canvas demo." Here are some resources for further exploration:
- Canvas Demos: An aggregation of demo pages of the canvas element.
- Mozilla Developer Center: Tutorials and resources for working with the canvas element.
- HTML5 Canvas Cheat Sheet: All of the canvas HTML and JavaScript API on a single page.