But not all of Flash’s use cases are usurped by HTML5. There is no way to
do digital rights management in HTML5; browsers such as Opera, Firefox
and Chrome allow visitors to save video to their machines with a click of the
context menu. If you need to prevent video from being saved, you’ll need
to use plug-ins. Capturing input from a user’s microphone or camera is
currently only possible with Flash (although a
specified for “post-5′′ HTML), so if you’re keen to write a Chatroulette killer,
HTML5 isn’t for you.
HTML5 Is Bad for Accessibility
A lot of discussion is going on about the accessibility of HTML5. This is
good and to be welcomed: with so many changes to the basic language of
the Web, ensuring that the Web is accessible to people who cannot see or
use a mouse is vital. Also vital is building in the solution, rather than bolting
it on as an afterthought: after all, many (most?) authors don’t even add
alternate text to images, so out-of-the-box accessibility is much more likely
to succeed than relying on people to add it.
This is why it’s great that HTML5 adds native controls for things like sliders
(, currently supported in Opera and Webkit
browsers) and date pickers (, Opera only)—see
Bruce’s HTML5 forms demo)—because previously we had to fake these with
JavaScript and images and then add keyboard support and WAI-ARIA roles
and attributes.
The