Adobe to Lower Itself to HTML5 Race?

Webmonkey’s Scott Gilbertson is certainly correct when heobserves that “its Flash technology is used as a punching bag by web-standards fans,” but reports that Adobe “has been building tools that embrace HTML5.”

The company recently released its own HTML5 video player, Gilbertson said, adding that “Adobe Illustrator and Dreamweaver CS5 now contain a number of new HTML5 export tools. Now it seems Flash might be joining the party.”

PCWorld speculatesthat perhaps Adobe is looking to get into the HTML5 race, “especially since Apple (News - Alert) has made it pretty clear that they're not going to bend on the issue. HTML5 is the (still-in-development) next major revision of HTML, and has often been touted by Apple as an alternative to Adobe's Flash plug-in.”

Or maybe Adobe’s just smelling the coffee. As Peter Kafka writes, “Remember the big Apple vs. everyone else video-format war from last spring? When Apple was pushing the HTML5 standard it wanted to use for video on the iPhone and iPad, instead of Adobe Systems' Flash? No one seems to spend much time talking about it anymore. For good reason: in large part because Steve Jobs (News - Alert) insisted on it, ‘online video’ increasingly means ‘HTML5-compatible.’ There's not much to debate anymore.”

At Adobe’s MAX conference this week “Adobe engineer Rik Cabanier showed of a demo of tool that converts Flash animations to HTML5. (Well, technically it looks like a combination of HTML5, CSS (News - Alert) and images.) Despite the claims of ‘HTML5,’ the page generated appears to be using the XHTML 1.0 doctype. Clearly this is a work in progress,” Gilbertson noted.

But, clearly momentum is on the side of HTML5. As Kafka points out, video search engine MeFeedia said that “54 percent of Web video is now compatible with HTML5. That's more than double the tally the company had back in May – less than six months ago.”