Forrester Research says HTML5 has a long way to go

Jeffrey Hammond, an analyst at Forrest Researcher, said in his report that even though HTML5 has been really popular recently but it still has a long way to go in order to replace the existing Rich Internet Application(RIA) technologies - Adobe's Flash, Microsoft's Silverlight etc. He suggests that this is going to be the case for the next 5 years, at least. So, its better for the developers to continue with the RIA development.

Although we have seen major vendors in the world adopting the new HTML5 technologies but as Jeffrey states, "inconsistent implementations of the draft HTML 5 specification and immature tooling make building HTML 5 apps that work consistently across browsers and operating systems a real challenge".

This war between HTML5 and RIA technologies has become a topic of real interest these days. We have seen some peculiar decisions.

• Apple, a propreitary tech fan, going nuts for promoting HTML5. They completely dropped support for propreitary RIA technologies in their light weight mobile products - iPad, iPhone.


• Google seems to be playing for both sides. Recently, they added a built in support for Adobe's Flash and since they have always been a promoter of open-web, they are of-course supporting HTML5.

Also at Google Atmosphere, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, showed company's enthusiams for HTML5 standard. He mentioned that due to the amazing features provided by HTML5, its going to be the next big thing. But looking at Google showing support for both the technologies, pretty much indicates that HTML5 will take some time to completely take over the web. After all, Flash still rules most of the Internet - online video content is major. 

Inspite of everyone going crazy for HTML5, things are looking a little slow for its wide usage and acceptance. Majority of population on web is still using non-HTML5 complaint browsers, probably the most widely known(among non tech users too) feature of HTML5, the revolutionary video tag, is having its own troubles of "which codec?". There are many such issues hindering its growth.