Hasta La Gadget!

Apple has upped the game in its fight against Flash, replacing mere words with action. A new page on Apple.com showcases HTML5 and its many Flash-like capabilities, demonstrating the combined power of plain markup combined with CSS3 and JavaScript running in a browser.

Fire it up on your iPad and play. You’ll see 2D and 3D photo galleries, an amazing typography demo (pictured above), a trailer for the new Tron movie that can be scaled and skewed in real time, along with audio, 360º diagrams and other fancy shenanigans.

It’s pretty spectacular, and at no point will you see the message “Loading…” or have to suffer your computer’s poor fans kicking in to keep things cool.

Although Flash isn’t mentioned by name, it is clear that this is a dig against the Adobe plugin. There is a link at the bottom of every page to Steve Jobs’ “Thoughts on Flash” essay, and the blurb is peppered with digs like “Standards aren’t add-ons to the web. They are the web” and “[C]reate a gallery that doesn’t require a third-party plug-in to render.” Vicious.

Whatever your thoughts on Flash (I hate it, mostly for its non-standard UIs and battery sucking performance), this is a smart move from Apple. Jobs can say all he wants about Flash but the regular, non-techie user won’t care. They just read mis-informed mainstream newspapers and parrot back the articles: “No Flash (Squawk!) No USB. No printing!” Spanish national newspaper El Pais even claimed that the iPad couldn’t display PDFs. Now anybody can point to Apple.com/HTML5 and be done.

There is one irony, though, as pointed out by the esteemed John Brownlee at Cult of Mac. This demo uses open standards, but will only run in Safari. You can modify Firefox to pretend that it is Safari and some parts will work, but we guess this is Apple’s way of saying that Safari is “more open” than other browsers.

HTML5 Showcase [Apple]