HTML5 Banners

Why has HTML5 become an industry standard? 

Flash was the go-to format for animated and video banner adverts for many years, so convincing brands to make the shift over to HTML5 was no easy task. But Flash actually fell short in quite a few areas, making it difficult for developers to make equally accessible units across a multitude of devices and for consumers to properly view.

Steve Jobs penned an open letter to users and industry experts in 2010 succinctly summing up the major issues with Flash that prohibited it from being a viable option for Apple products and in turn, the rest of the technological world. Citing issues such as proprietary software, a lack of reliability, security, performance, the drawbacks and downfalls of Flash seem numerous and yet, not exhausted. Additionally, Flash had other issues that would further impact the consumer’s ability to enjoy and interact the material that is being served to them on the web.

Flash’s inability to decode video units in hardware meant that videos were decoded in the software itself which often resulted in the consumer’s battery life being reduced by half. Another major hindrance is Flash’s reliance on rollovers and mouse pointers which greatly reduced accessibility of online material with more and more screens becoming touch based, rather than mouse reliant. Overall, Flash was a program that was designed to work on a PC with a mouse.

When the tech world started turning to devices that were touch-based, low power, and made use of technology that worked no matter the device they were on, Flash fell short over and over. It is also important to note all major desktop and mobile platforms have phased out Flash as of 2015, Adobe eventually announced that Flash has deprecated and has been given an official end-of-life date in 2020.