[1eyedjack]

Interested in some feedback. Speaking as a non-IT layman, the terms mean very little to me, but some articles that I have been reading suggest that Flash is pretty much dead in the water following Adobe's decision to cease development of Flash for mobile devices in favour of HTML5 (which presumably serves much the same function). I was only rooting around for info because my Android mobile phone is incapable of installing Flash and incapable therefore of playing much of the video content on news pages on the web. Not that I would be wanting to play BBO on such a small-screen device, but it got me to thinking about what impact this would have on the web version of BBO. Are all y'all expecting to have to re-write the whole shebang in html5 now?

[barmar]

Unfortunately, HTML5 is not yet well supported by most browsers. And many people still use old browsers like IE 7 that will never support HTML5. So far, Adobe has not yet expressed plans to stop development of Flash for Mac and Windows desktops, although they have announced that they're stopping Linux development.

Can't your phone use the BBO Mobile App that we came out with a couple of months ago?

Converting the BBO web app to HTML5 would be a huge amount of work. Some parts of it can be automated, but not most of it.

[Mbodell]

In general, from a purity point of view and a future point of view, HTML5 (or just HTML depending on if you are a W3C person or a WHATWG person) is the right answer and the right technology to use. From a practical point of view we are not yet at the point where everyone is using HTML5 enabled browsers that support all the features and functions available in flash and other non-standard plugins. There is a similar purity versus practical battle going on with respect to programming native mobile phone applications versus mobile web HTML5 sites. There many folks try to compromise by using a native wrapper around a mobile HTML5 application that helps with portability across mobile OS and different devices but still allows for access to all the native bells and whistles (microphone, camera, GPS, phone, etc.).

It will take a while, and new versions of things are slow to change, but I imagine that the flash version of BBO will, in not too many more years, be about as popular as the native windows client to BBO.

[woefuwabit]

Rewriting BBO as a web application doesn't require HTML5.
Ajax is sufficient for BBO, and all browsers support that, and that I believe is the direction BBO should be heading.

My guess why this has not been done is it requires a complete redesign of the server to use web services instead of persistant socket.