For close to 20 years, Flash by Adobe was the holy grail of developing multimedia content for the web due to its ability to play seamless audio-video content. It was adopted widely and so unquestionably dominated the market that there was rarely a computer in the world that did not have Flash installed in it.
In fact, ‘swf’ as the Flash file extension is called was a favorite among e-learning course developers due to its ability to deliver engaging content in the form of Videos and Animations. However, Adobe recently announced that it will officially discontinue Flash, which has prompted many content creators and administrators to begin a wide migration program from SWF to HTML5. Organizations that have chosen to create and showcase eLearning content in SWF files are also among those who are looking to migrate to HTML5.
Swf saw a slow but sure decline due to a plethora of reasons. Some of them are their inability to keep up with the rapidly evolving technology. As newer updates were developed and pushed out to machines, there were more and more cases of system crashes. It was also discovered by Adobe that the Flash platform could be easily compromised by Malware developers, in turn raising a question on the security and privacy of end-users.
In today’s scenario when the world is consuming more and more content on mobiles and portable devices, the SWF format suffered a severe setback when it was found to be incompatible with IOS, the iconic operating system of Apple. It was also found to be a huge drain on device batteries and would crash frequently.
Say hello to HTML5. It is an intuitive and light architecture that requires less processing power. It works seamlessly across devices and provides the same experience across operating systems. It doesn’t require additional plugins and is SEO friendly too.
Besides the obvious benefits shared above that HTML5 offers over SWF, here are some other reasons to convert SWF to html5.
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- Preserve organizational investments in E-learning
Organizations that have invested in flash-based learning modules need to necessarily convert the existing bank of SWF files to html5 to salvage the time and money invested in creating those modules. By doing so organizations will ensure that users will continue to use these modules uninterruptedly. - Ensure correct deployment of content
At any given point in time, the learning and development team of organizations or curriculum developers have a content bank ready which is in the pipeline to be converted. By converting this content from SWF to html5 in the initial stages will avoid multiple iterations and deliver the content correctly in the first attempt itself. - Encourage learning
Due to the inherent flexibility and the light architecture of html5, it lends itself to be accessed on multiple devices at one time. This removes any access bottlenecks and facilitates many learners to access the system at the same time without experiencing crashes. It is ideal for creating content banks which can be accessed according to learner convenience. - Increased employee productivity and overall profitability
Employee productivity jumps as they are able to access training programs from multiple devices at the same time. Also, html5, unlike SWF offers greater design flexibility adding to the learner engagement. When employee productivity increases it contributes to the company’s profitability and a greater ROI from learning programs. - Infrastructure cost savings
Converting SWF files to html5 can lead to sizable savings in infrastructure costs over a period of time. The reason is that html5 operates at a much faster speed while taking much fewer resources. This means lesser infrastructure needed to deliver an even better user experience. These savings in infrastructure cost directly contribute to the bottom line of businesses. - SEO friendly
Choosing to convert your SWF e-learning content into html5 can help e-courses to become more popular and attract a higher number of new learners. It’s possible because html5 is SEO friendly and can allow each of its videos, animations or explainer videos to be individually searchable and rankable with SEO efforts. - Acquisition and development cost savings
HTML5 is open-source and is easily available while SWF is proprietary to Adobe and needs to be purchased separately in order to create e-learning modules. This adds to the development cost of modules.
- Preserve organizational investments in E-learning
When Adobe decided to pull the plug on Flash, it compelled all content creators and e-learning companies to move to html5. However, this move was driven by developers and users as html5 fits in nicely with new behavior like the propensity to consume more content on mobile. Also, more people are getting savvy about learning on devices which is easily possible with html5. It won’t be wrong to call html5 as the new SWF.
