Love, love, love that the writers make HTML5 sound like an Apple-backed web video technology. Because we all know HTML5 is but a video player. It’s only HTML, after all.
More seriously, though, I just don’t understand all this hand-wringing. YouTube has an HTML5 video player beta out, and Hulu can’t be far behind. The web is already moving away from Flash for video; Apple’s only further encouraging that move.
“But what about my beloved Flash games?” you might say. They wouldn’t be playable on the iPad even with Flash enabled, Neven Mrgan notes:
Attention folks expecting “the full web”, including today’s Flash games, on a touchscreen device: no keyboard, no mouseover. Think about it.
And designers using Flash for essential site elements will face increasing pressure to adopt web standards, to the benefit of everyone.
Even if the reasons for doing so are entirely selfish, Apple is trying to relieve the web of its dependency on Flash, and I applaud the effort.