BUILD | WEB DEVELOPMENT Breaking HTML5
Is HTML5 a blessing or a curse for developers? Craig Chapple looks at the platform with ambitions to challenge Adobe’s ubiquitous Flash web player as the leading browser games development platform
Top to bottom: Remode Studios technical lead Chris Herbert, Adobe group product manager Deepa Subramaniam, and web developer at Scirra Tom Gullen. Above right: HTML5 game Tesseract Hyper Cube
INITIALLY HERALDED AS the future of browser gaming and the next step beyond the monopolised world of Flash, HTML5 has since faced criticism for being tough to code with and possessing a string of broken features. The coding platform, the fifth iteration of
the HTML standard, was supposed to be a one stop shop for developers looking to create and distribute their game to a multitude of platforms and browsers, but things haven’t been plain sailing. Not just including the new HTML mark-up language, but also incorporating other features and APIs such as CSS3, SVG and JavaScript, the platform was supposed to allow for the easy insertion of features for the modern browser such as video and audio, and provide them without the need for users to install numerous plug-ins. And whilst this has worked to a certain
degree, and a number of companies such as Microsoft, Apple, Google and Mozilla under the W3C have collaborated to bring together a single open standard, the problems it possesses cannot be ignored.
BREAKING UP Perhaps the biggest issue currently plaguing HTML5 is its audio implementation, which many developers claim is broken. Chris Herbert, technical lead of Remode Studios, says that audio is considerably behind the
42| APRIL 2012
rest of the platform’s features, with problems such as lag and file support, although he believes there could be vast improvements in this area in the future.
There are clearly areas of HTML5 that
need some work, audio being an area that’s lagging behind quite dramatically.
Chris Herbert, Remode Studios
“There are clearly areas of HTML5 that need some work, audio being an area that’s lagging behind quite dramatically, particularly in mobile browsers,” he says. “The problems mainly relate to how sound data is swapped out of sound channels, many browsers are experiencing a lag, or in some cases jumps or pops. Also, the support for audio file formats is inconsistent, with some browsers favouring the ogg vorbis format whilst others – such as Safari – favour the MP3 format. “Issues such as these highlight that this is a
technology in its infancy, but given its potential as a fully featured platform in its
own right, I believe that we will see HTML5 find maturity much quicker than previous incarnations of HTML.” Sandy Duncan, CEO of YoYo Games,
responsible for 2D-focused engine Game Maker, agrees that audio is broken and says that this is an issue that is being worked on, but due to the cross-platform nature of HTML5, will take time to be approved. “As to audio being broken, yes it is a little,”
he says. “The browser guys know this, and are working hard to fix it, but with much of the core browser being used on many platforms, it has to be verified and checked a lot to make sure it won’t just kill something and that makes some changes a little slow to come through. “The new WebAudio API will help though;
it gives a very flexible audio system without the old baggage the audio tag brings.” But the need to fix the issue is presenting
its own problems, says Steven Goodwin, creator of cross-platform tool SGX Engine. He believes it has the potential to create a divergence in solutions, which seems against the nature of why HTML5 was developed in the first place. “Both Google and Mozilla are building solutions to the problem, but in different ways,” says Goodwin. “This is creating the same problems in divergence that plagued the web in years
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