by Martin Appleford-Cook

Increasingly we experience the web on mobile devices, including cellphones and tablets. Added to this, with users adopting the latest browsers means that viewing content needs to be completely cross browser compatible. The familiar "you need flash to view this content" error message when watching a video causes frustration for many visitors around the world. Users expect to see hassle free web pages and content on their device of choice. They really won't hang around if they see an error message, they will be off to another site or application that does work for them.

Step forward HTML5. Way back in 2004, Mozilla, Apple and Opera employees got together to develop the HTML specification to include a multitude of enhancements and features.  Modern browsers have incorporated the plethora of features and enhancements added into HTML5 and so ensure cross platform compatibility. HTML5 was developed to give website and web based applications more flexibility and to enable them to utilise existing skills and bring development in-house.

More importantly, HTML5 brings the HTML specification up to date with regards to video, audio, data and graphics. Developers had to struggle with developing for multiple systems ( e.g. Flash, Silverlight ) on multiple browsers and devices. This increases costs and often causes problems for the end users viewing content such as video.  By standardizing all of the multimedia features which users now expect on a website or application, it's possible to reduce the costs and time spent ensuring it all works seamlessly.

New tags and enhancements built into HTML5 ensure working with databases, multimedia, site and page structure, forms and APIs is a lot smoother. One key benefit of HTML5 are the ability to directly support drawing, animation, audio and video.  As mentioned above this greatly reduces the need for developers to learn and deploy Flex, Flash, Silver and javascript technologies when creating web based applications and web sites.

By providing tags and enhancements/features to cover off animation directly, developers learn one system to be used across all systems and devices. Less time spent on cross platform development hopefully should ensure more time spent on the animation itself! Video can now be embedded directly into the HTML of a web page with parameters and variables configured without loading a plugin or a third party application.

VYRE has developed a number of applications and websites on Unify that utilise HTML5 to ensure cross device support. We've provided frontend video playback and viewing for a number of clients to ensure that their users and clients can see videos without the horror of seeing the No Flash error. Our Advance UI (User Interface) features enable us to push HTML5, Javascript, RSS and many many other formats with minimal configuration. The system can be set to output to standard browsers on PC's and Mac's through to mobile devices such as phones and tablets. Additional standards and video formats are updated all the time and are added seamlessly into our offering. When a client needs to be sure that their site or marketing application can be seen by all their staff they are safe knowing that their Unify based solution covers them all.