The iPad makes demands on web developers

Web developers behind the sites on Apple's approved list of iPad-ready online destinations have confronted an issue that the device-maker is forcing to the fore: are official World Wide Web Consortium standard languages sufficient tools to deliver cutting edge functionality, or do plug-ins lead the way in design innovation?

Soon after Apple unveiled the iPad in January, one point quickly became clear for web developers: Just as with the iPhone, the device would not support Adobe Flash, or any other web plug-in.

Instead, if web developers wanted all the dynamic content on their pages such as videos and animations to appear correctly on Apple's new device, they had to create it using only the next generation markup language for the web, HTML5, and related open standards.

At first glance, it appears like a logical move to stick with open standards, rather than technology largely controlled by a single company.

"A lot of the things that Flash has traditionally been used for, were Flash's domain, because there weren't any credible open standards available. Now there are," said Bruce Lawson, a vocal HTML5 advocate who also works on the Opera Software as a developer relations (for this interview, he stressed that his opinions were his own, and not those of Opera).

But a casual search on Google reveals that there are at least 74 million web pages that use the Shockwave Flash (SWF) format. It is a tall order to ask all of them to change for a single company's line of products, even if Apple sold more than 500,000 of these devices last weekend.

Observers also note that the developer tools for HTML5 aren't as advanced as those for Flash, and the standard is not finished yet, which could lead to more work for developers down the road to readjust pages to meet the finalised standard.

And by eschewing the web's plug-in model, the iPad may potentially miss out on cutting edge features enjoyed elsewhere on the web.

For photo-sharing site Flickr, the chief feature on the site that needed to be addressed was video, which the company has been gradually introducing into its service.

"It was not a huge effort," said Flickr Project Manager Markus Spiering, though quickly adding the site's developers were already familiar with the standards that Apple was requiring for the device.

"We were using Flash for our video content, but the iPad doesn't support Flash," Spiering said. "The iPad has a built-in HTML5 video player, which we could leverage."

The web development team were already testing HTML5, and had already borrowed some of the work it did for the Apple TV, which worked well in the iPad format.

"It was a couple of days of testing and then we enabled it," Spiering said.

Now, when an iPad user visits the Flickr site, the site's servers determine the visitor is using that device and switches from sending the video to a Flash player to sending it to Apple's HTML5 video player.

Spiering said that to offer video for all Flickr visitors using HTML5 would be a larger challenge, because additional controls — such as full screen capability — would need to be added to bring the browsers up to feature parity with the iPad.

Apple itself has released guidelines on how to prepare web pages for the iPad. In a nutshell: All the capabilities you seek can be found by using Javascript, Cascading Styles Sheets (CSS) and a set of still-evolving standards loosely associated with the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML5. What could not be used are plug-ins of any sort, including Adobe Flash.

Adobe has been, understandably, defensive over Apple's stance, and playing up Flash's use on other portable devices, as a way to deflect attention away from Apple's decision.

However, Dave McAllister, Director of Open Source and Standards (OSS) at Adobe Systems suggests that Apple itself may be putting the iPad at a disadvantage by not including plug-ins.

"From our viewpoint, it's not just the lack of Flash, it's the lack of being able to use plug-ins that are not owned, controlled and approved, that is an issue," McAllister said.

McAllister noted that innovation with the web format has historically taken place not with the standards themselves, but rather plug-ins. Standards take years to ratify and tend to center around technology that has been so widely replicated, it has in effect been commoditised.

"Standards don't lead innovation. To innovate means to build on or out from the existing platform," McAllister said. "You don't want to have to wait for the consistent commodity approach to catch back up to the innovation. You want innovation to happen, and [standardize] the best from it."

It's been the plug-in model that introduces new functionality to the web, he argued. Think of Sun Microsystems' Java plug-in, for instance, which introduced rich graphical functionality for the web in the mid-1990s. By eschewing plug-ins, the iPad could potentially lose out on some of the cutting edge features enjoyed on other web browsers.

Another issue that McAllister notes is that web development shops will have to come up with two versions of their sites, ones that run Flash and ones that don't. "Most of these [shops] already have Flash as part of their workflow, so now they are adding a second part of the workflow," McAllister said.

For its part, HTML5 is starting to prove itself to be a very capable markup language, able, in theory, to replicate much if not all that Flash could offer. HTML5 and associated standards such as CSS and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), will be an "open platform for rich web applications," said Philippe Le Hégaret, who is the W3C's interaction domain leader overseeing graphics, HTML, and video, in an email.