HTML5 – A Plugin Free Paradigm

HTML5 provides native support for many features that used to be possible only with plugins or complex hacks (a native drawing API, native sockets, and so on). Plugins, of course, present problems:

• Plugins cannot always be installed.
• Plugins can be disabled or blocked (for example, the Apple iPad does not ship with a Flash plugin).
• Plugins are a separate attack vector.
• Plugins are difficult to integrate with the rest of an HTML document (because of plugin boundaries, clipping, and transparency issues).

Although some plugins have high install rates, they are often blocked in controlled corporate environments. In addition, some users choose to disable these plugins due to the unwelcome advertising displays that they empower. However, if users disable your plugin, they also disable the very program you’re relying on to display your content.

Plugins also often have difficulty integrating their displays with the rest of the browser content, which causes clipping or transparency issues with certain site designs. Because plugins use a self-contained rendering model that is different from that of the base web page, developers face difficulties if pop-up menus or other visual elements need to cross the plugin boundaries on a page. This is where HTML5 comes on the scene, smiles, and waves its magic wand of native functionality. You can style elements with CSS and script with JavaScript. In fact, this is where HTML5 flexes its biggest muscle, showing us a power that just didn’t exist in previous versions of HTML. It’s not just that the new elements provide new functionality. It’s also the added native interaction with scripting and styling that enables us to do much more than we could ever do before.

Take the new canvas element, for example. It enables us to do some pretty fundamental things that were not possible before (try drawing a diagonal line in a web page in HTML4). However, what’s most interesting is the power that we can unlock with the APIs and the styling we can apply with just a few lines of CSS code. Like well-behaved children, the HTML5 elements also play nicely together. For example, you can grab a frame from a video element and display it on a canvas, and the user can just click the canvas to play back the video from the frame you just grabbed. This is just one example of what a native code has to offer over a plugin. In fact, virtually everything becomes easier when you’re not working with a black box. What this all adds up to is a truly powerful new medium.

Posted in: HTML5