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This year, I am thrilled to be flying to OSCON for; 1. I will be speaking on a panel along with two fascinating and very experienced developers + we’ll be talking about the hottest topic discussed today, and 2. It’s my first time in Portland, Oregon the home of free speech and microbreweries.

HTML5’s Multimedia Future – A panel lead by my colleague Jason Levitt featuring Mark Pilgrim from Google, author of Dive Into HTML5 and yours truly. This is super exciting! Not only we’ll be discussing one of the most interesting and passionate topics, I’m actually getting a chance to learn from two very experienced web developers who have authored books, created full large scale solutions on companies like Yahoo! and Google.

I will be discussing HTML5 media from the Flash Developer point of view. From the eyes of those who got use to rich authoring environments, an object oriented language, closed magic box that takes care of rendering and cross-browser/device implementations and a wide range of other headaches. We’re spoiled. But we’re also the ones responsible for the most of the Rich part on the web today (true, some of us are also responsible for the awful-over-rich parts, but that’s another post and those exist outside of Flash as well). Flash developers have long been the (de-facto) standard bearers of amazing web UIs, complex animations, media apps, kick-ass advertising solutions, web video playback & interaction, rich internet applications & games that just work, and work everywhere (well, at least almost, many thanks to Steve). Now, they tell us, it’s time we broaden horizons and open our minds to learn and use more of the de-jure standards: HTML, JavaScript and CSS.

We’ve already been using these technologies, almost no medium-large scale game and application can be fully created in Flash without integrating HTML and JS… After all, the hosting environment (Browser) is communicating JS and the page is usually layout in HTML. So we know HTML and JS, at least the basics and the languages are so close (JS and ActionScript are both ECMA Script based) it doesn’t take too long to get use to writing HTML and JS. HTML5 also introduces the canvas and along will join CSS3 and SVG with a lot of features to enable robust vector drawing and animation, effects and transitions engines.

Now, do you really expect me to change EVERYTHING? And what about cross-browser implementations, they agreed on a standard, this doesn’t mean they’ll actually use the same code, thus will expose various bugs and will not be compatible. And only jut small portion of browsers are open source… and the IDE, Flash rocks, do you really expect designers to ditch Flash and write code (CSS3/Canvas/SVG) to draw vector art and create animations? Complex applications and games will be a pain to write without a true object oriented approach… Do you expect me to convert videos? and which codec should I choose anyways? …
Yes, you have a lot to say, and it is all true – and we would like to hear it!

Nevertheless, some of the content online is already transforming. As we watch YouTube and many others re-implementing their websites based on HTML5. Converting videos and rewriting applications. Whenever a new technology comes along, new opportunities are presented – Rewriting applications from Flash to HTML5 & JS will most likely generate business, at least on the medium-larger scale applications and websites.

– That was a long teaser for what we’ll discuss on the HTML5’s Multimedia Future panel – be sure to join us and bring your best arguments and pain-points, stories and ideas for solutions: 4:30pm  Wednesday, 07/21/2010.

Stay tuned for a coming post as I promise to follow up with more in-depth writeup about moving from Flash to HTML5 & JS and more importantly how the two work together to balance the mess such standard transformations compel on us.

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OSCON is great for it’s awesome sessions, interesting talks (those in-between sessions, during lunch…), kick-ass parties and fun expo zone.
Last year’s OSCON at San Jose CA was just perfect, with great people around, awesome parties and many connections created.
Here are some of last year’s pictures. If you plan to attend this year, drop a comment below and let’s plan to meet.