This post is an email from a forum with which I subscribe. All I can say is, I could not agree more! Thanks John.

“I’m sorry but HTML5 isn’t actually an official standard yet and therefore it is impossible for any browser (even the most modern ones) to be compliant with it!

HTML5 absolutely does NOT offer all of the features of Flex. Flex (hosted in Flash Player or AIR) was a truly object oriented language that would allow someone to write code once and deploy to many devices and browsers in a pixel perfect way with little or no compatibility issues.

HTML5 + JavaScript has none of the above properties. Yes, people have faked object oriented like features with hundreds of KBs of JavaScript that you have to load on every page but in my opinion that is bending a technology further than it was meant to go. And yes, people have also built hundreds of KBs of “polyfill” JavaScript libraries but they only support certain brands / versions of browsers to a point (plus you have to load so much stuff so performance will be impacted).

HTML5 is landing us right back into the browser hell of the late 90’s / early 00’s where most of your code was concerned with detecting the browser and working around each of their little quirks (or just simply making it clear that certain browsers aren’t supported).

Even taking into account that the HTML version of Workspace is still in pre-release stage, you’d have to admit that you cannot open the application in Chrome, Safari, FireFox and IE9 and get the exact same user experience in all 4 browsers – conversely, you can open the Flex based Workspace in any of those browsers and you are unlikely to notice a difference. Moreover, you can open the Flex based Workspace in IE6 & IE7 with no troubles at all…you cannot even get past the login screen in the HTML version of Workspace using those browsers. As our current client requires us to support IE7, we have had to build our own HTML Workspace application using “traditional” HTML4 technologies.

Eventually HTML5 will become a standard and every browser will implement it in its own way with its own quirks that will – one day – hopefully converge into a manageable set of known issues that can be easily worked around. Then all we need to do is wait for everyone to get rid of their legacy browsers and we’ll be fine…by which point people will start saying that HTML6 is the only way to do things!

Oh well…at least it keeps us all in a job I suppose.”

-John Nesbitt

Thanks again John, I enjoyed your rant.