Modern HTML5 has feature-parity with the now-obsolete
Adobe Flash
Adobe Flash (formerly Macromedia Flash and FutureSplash) is a multimedia Computing platform, software platform used for production of Flash animation, animations, rich web applications, application software, desktop applications, mobile apps, mo ...
. Both include features for playing audio and
video
Video is an electronic medium for the recording, copying, playback, broadcasting, and display of moving visual media. Video was first developed for mechanical television systems, which were quickly replaced by cathode-ray tube (CRT) syste ...
within web pages. Flash was specifically built to integrate
vector graphics
Vector graphics is a form of computer graphics in which visual images are created directly from geometric shapes defined on a Cartesian plane, such as points, lines, curves and polygons. The associated mechanisms may include vector display a ...
and light games in a web page, features that HTML5 also supports.
On December 31, 2020, Adobe ended support of Flash Player.
"HTML5" in this article sometimes refers not only to the HTML5 specification, which does not itself define ways to do animation and interactivity within web pages, but to HTML5 and related standards like SVG,
JavaScript
JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of Website, websites use JavaScript on the Client (computing), client side ...
and
CSS 3
Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is a style sheet language used for describing the presentation of a document written in a markup language such as HTML or XML (including XML dialects such as SVG, MathML or XHTML). CSS is a cornerstone technol ...
. Animation via JavaScript is also possible with HTML 4.
Comparison table
The table below compares the features of the Flash platform, the HTML5 specification and the features implemented in modern
web browser
A web browser is application software for accessing websites. When a user requests a web page from a particular website, the browser retrieves its files from a web server and then displays the page on the user's screen. Browsers are used on ...
s.
Notes
#Allows text to overflow into other text boxes, useful for
desktop publishing
Desktop publishing (DTP) is the creation of documents using page layout software on a personal ("desktop") computer. It was first used almost exclusively for print publications, but now it also assists in the creation of various forms of online c ...
.
#Static text created via Flash editor is automatically embedded and anti-aliased. Text fields created via ActionScript need fonts to be manually embedded for anti-aliasing to work.
Comparison
Software support
Flash
Originally, web browsers could not render Flash media themselves, and required the