Adobe’s Flash product has obviously been an integral part of the web for many years now. But it still has a major weakness when it comes search engines and complexity. While Adobe and others have been working on solutions to make Flash-based website more Google-friendly, they’re still nowhere near as crawl-able as regular HTML-based pages. FluidHTML or “Fhtml” is a new server-side markup language that hopes to merge Flash-like functionality with the easier-to-use HTML language.
Obviously, trying to create what would essentially have to be a new web standard is no small task. But the group behind Fhtml thinks they have a shot to do it because Flash is so widely used by millions of sites on the web who want a better visual appearance than HTML can offer. Aside from just Flash, Fhtml is also going up against Silverlight another Adobe framework, Flex. But Fhtml claims to be not only simpler than both Flash and Silverlight, but more powerful than Flex.
Another downside to Flex, Silverlight, and Flash is that they all must be compiled. Fhtml, like HTML, does not need to be. This makes it a lot easier to edit on the fly. And because all of those are more complex, they often require a special developer with just those skills to create a site using those technologies, Fhtml promises to be much simpler. And because it’s server side, the company says that Java developers, PHP developers, Ruby developers, .NET developers and Python developers can all write Fhtml in their native language.
Today on stage, FluidHTML CEO Michael Collette and Founder Jim Kremens prototyped the Southeby’s (one current partner) website in FluidHTML. They also showed a Hulu media player made in Fhtml. They’re looking for $1 to $2 million in funding in October.
Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased)
The experts: Don Dodge, Yossi Vardi, Ron Conway, George Zachary, and Jason Hirschhorn.
Q: How does this compare with HTML 5?
MC: I expect HTML 5 is a big leap forward, but what happens after that?
JK: And HTML 5 won’t be fully implemented until 2014.
Q: What has Adobe said about it?
MC: We haven’t spoken to them. (Laughs)
Q: Making Flash searchable is a big plus, but getting developers to switch their language is tough, how do you deal with that?
JK: The product is free to developers. And we think it opens them up to be more creative than HTML, while not having to deal with some difficulties of Flash.
MC: It runs at the full speed of Flash too.
Q: What’s the business?
MC: We charge a low fee to publishers.
Q: Have vast is the object library?
MC: It’s extensible, which is great. Developers will expand it beyond what it is now. And an open API in January.
Video
Other Coverage:
TC50: FluidHtml builds a more web-friendly version of Flash VentureBeat.
FluidHTML seeks to bridge Web programming divide CNET.
FluidHTML seeks to bridge web programming divide Builder.au
FluidHTML: A Markup Language That Generates Flash Content Flash Speaks ActionScript.
Sounds like this does for Flash what Google Web Toolkit does for Java/JS.
Nothing will ever be as popular as plain old html and flash as long as it requires an extraneous download to work.
Didn’t space150 do this like 2+ years ago?
http://www.space150.com/news/faust-flash-augmenting-standards
If this can create Flash movies with simple HTML like they appear to be promising this will be big. A lot of developers I know, myself included, who know HTML but not ActionScript would love this.
No chance of success.
You really don’t think so? It’s one of my faves so far.
Definitely, no way.
A promise of “the full speed of flash” is not really much of a promise.
Atleast they should have a fully functional website so we can have a idea of what we are dealing with.
fluidhtml.com only has its company name on its page.
Hmm.. did they not think that people may want to check out their site and see what it is?
The single page site has no content, and a non-degradable JS contact link.
If I were intrigued before, I’m now dismissive.
via space150.com: http://www.space150.com/news/faust-flash-augmenting-standards
How is this different from SproutCore or Cappuccino?
Ugghh… this is just so… unnecessary. There was a time when Flash offered things that could not be achieved any other way. Now, HTML, CSS and JavaScript can do just about anything Flash can, and what they can’t do, probably shouldn’t be done anyways. Instead of trying to figure out ways to extend the usablity of Flash, we should be trying to find ways to eradicate it.
Hear, hear!
I think the key difference is that Flash is a lot quicker about accomplishing the same thing client-side processor wise.
Flash has still many other things to offer you can’t do any other way (browser indebendent styling, p2p, c+ support.. just to name a few) html5 is just getting complicated and no better and javascript is still so sloow compared to flash… then why stick to the old? But anyway, we will see.
As much as I agree with you, I think competition is always a good thing.
Chris
Please stop the hate.
Silverlight does all of this…
..and more
Building on top of flash is absolutely the wrong direction to go. Browsers will continue to become more powerful & continue to move towards standardization. This will be shortlived.
It will only work if they open up free development and free publishing. To get wide adoption it just needs to be totally free and preferably open source.
How to make money than? Be the best company in the world for developing on their own platform/invention.
Exactly. Charging publishers to deliver dynamic Flash probably won’t work. It’s not like there isn’t a better alternative – like actually using Flash to create the content – which is free for publishers.
Creating a video player ‘on the fly’ is nice but who cares? There are plenty of already available, and mostly free, flash media players available all over the web – and they don’t require any special skills to setup – a novice html guy could do it.
Unless it’s free for both ends (developers and their clients) it simply won’t fly.
Trying to market themselves as a new HTML version of Flash is just market spin. What they are is just another JavaScript library, which seems to be coded server side, outputting what HTML & JavaScript is needed for a particular page.
Also despite speed increases in JavaScript engines in various browsers, currently ActionScript is still faster than JavaScript, so it’s hard to believe in their claims that they are just as fast as Flash.
Also if they want to be as “powerful as Flex” then they need JavaScript components that have all the features and more than those found in the Flex framework. Which once again I find this hard to believe, since it’s taken a while for Microsoft, with all of their resources, to catch up with Adobe’s Flex framework when it comes to components available with Silverlight.
This not a JavaScript library at all – the engine is Flash-based and interprets the HTML-style markup client-side.
That reload button REALLY needs to not be right next to the play/pause button.
*stifles rage*
But yes, this product has a lion’s share of my interest and love and hopes for the future.
And stuff. SEM with Flash? Rock. out.
This page hung as I scrolled down, couldn’t work out why before seeing the flash video appear.
That is why this idea is doomed – flash isn’t fast, isn’t efficient and is unnecessary with the advent of canvas and local storage.
The html source doesn’t even validate, strike 1 against true SEO.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fluidhtml.com%2Fmain%2Fpages%2Fhome.php&charset=%28detect+automatically%29&doctype=Inline&group=0
Reading HTML into flash has been done for a long time without using 80 billion custom attributes and inline styles. This product is garbage. Command Z.
Whether it validates or not makes no difference to SEO which is a good thing considering how only ~4.13% of sites have atleast 1 page that validates correctly according to Opera http://dev.opera.com/articles/view/mama-markup-validation-report/
If this project gets funding, I’ll eat a shotgun.
ActionScript is faster when drawing stuff, it is not always faster evaluating pure JS compared to V8 or Nitro in Chrome/Safari. I have a numerically intense JS library that runs substantially faster in Chrome/Webkit than a Flash version. The Tamarin Tracing technology that’s in Flash and Firefox runs a factor of 3x to 6x slower on the same workload.
ActionScript does well in some microbenchmarks if you supply type information, in particular, if you tell the VM that a loop variable is an integer, for example.
This is a horrible, horrible idea. Here are some issues I found with this right off the top of my head.
Here’s a reference link they were touting in the demo to Sotherbys that I’ll refer to: http://www.fluidhtml.com/main/pages/demos/sothebys/#/r=index.php|r.main=lot.php?id=17/
1) None of the text on the page is selectable. How am I supposed to copy and paste?
2) It’s not SEO friendly in the lest bit. Here is what Google sees: http://www.seo-browser.com/results.php?user_agent=1&address=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fluidhtml.com%2Fmain%2Fpages%2Fdemos%2Fsothebys%2F%23%2Fr%3Dindex.php|r.main%3Dlot.php%3Fid%3D17%2F&action=Parse+URL
3) Requires JavaScript. Try disabling JavaScript and you’re left with a blank blue page with no fallback.
4) Impossible to print. I’ll ignore the fact that the Print button on the site doesn’t work but doing File->Print gives me a completely blank page.
5) First thing I’m greeted with when arriving: a loading screen.
Maybe if the creators took the time to actually learn HTML + CSS and a bit of JavaScript (which isn’t too far off from Actionscript) then maybe they would see how utterly pointless FHTML really is. This comment in the HTML source really gives away their web development skills
“Have to create a WHOLE OTHER css file because you can’t have two a:hover in one stylesheet”
Yes you can, learn about the cascade -> http://www.devarticles.com/c/a/Web-Style-Sheets/Learn-CSS-Introduction-to-Inheritance-Specificity-and-Cascade/
So who would be a good target audience for technology like this? Companies who think DRM and locking down content is a great idea.
Good points… I was a little bit excited by this until I read your comment. Haha.
Nice try, guys.
Dear god, this is awful. And their web site is so horrifically broken that it simply doesn’t work.
While it may not be perfect and their site may be slow and broken, surely this kind of Flash is better than Flash as we currently have it, no?
Isn’t that like saying “This shit is less shitty than the shit we’ve got now”?
- Impossible to print. I’ll ignore the fact that the Print button on the site doesn’t work but doing File->Print gives me a completely blank page.
Good point. Flash sucks for this. Hopefully they will work on it.
“Have to create a WHOLE OTHER css file because you can’t have two a:hover in one stylesheet”
Yes you can, learn about the cascade -> http://www.devarticles.com/c/a…..d-Cascade/
Flash only supports the hover attribute on tags, so if you specify more than one it gets confused.
http://www.fluidhtml.com/main/#/r=main.php|r.ch.container=pages/home.php/
1. Can’t view source, but can view selected bits of fhtml (certain text *is* selectable, contrary to above comment), which leads me to ponder: semantic markup or not? Anyone seen it (for instance, what is “h2demo”?) I’m thinking not crawlable, nor indexable, certainly not semantic.
2. Also thinking it would be neat to write the Flash out in an HTML form but the idea is not new. I forget the name of the website I used last summer where you actually edited the video code yourself, but it was very,very similar to how this works.
3. My main gripe with it is having text in fhtml, don’t see why it’s necessary or what it’s adding.
I truly despise this for a host of reasons not the least of which is that I want to see flash disappear entirely from the web. Yes, there are some things it can do that the current HTML standard cannot do but the thought of making a closed-source proprietary technology even more ubiquitous flies in the face of everything I hope the web will one day be. I would rather the smart guys who made this thing work use their energy to further the cause of an even more powerful HTML standard.
The speed on the Sotheby’s website was incredible slow.
That will turn away all visitors of your site.
Wouldn’t it be more logical for the browser vendors to accelerate support for HTML5 (or at least certain features of HTML5), than to further extend the use of proprietary technologies?
For example, in terms of browser support:
HTML5 v1.0 could contain a certain set of HTML5 functionality
HTML5 v2.0 could contain the previous + additional HTML5 functionality
…
The browser vendors & the standards community could establish the priorities & focus on getting the job done.
It’s not about turning HTML tags into Flash movies! Let’s open the web by moving from Flash to HTML5/CSS3 enabled websites now!
Yes, you can do that and still have all those flashy effects in your app. Take OpenLaszlo:
http://www.openlaszlo.org
OpenLaszlo can generate HTML/CSS and SWF8/9 apps out of XML/JavaScript code. Just compile to either JavaScript or SWF, deliver HTML5/CSS3 enabled apps to modern browsers like Webkit, Safari, Firefox, Chrome and Opera, and give older browsers and IE6/7/8 the SWF version.
Check out this demo I built showing what that means: http://tinyurl.com/mjqrlw
Which means: use HTML5/CSS3 features now in the next RIA you build, and have Flash as backup!
can’t see the point of this but still interesting idea.