Lately, there has been much hoopla about the battle between Flash and HTML5. Anyone in the Flash community will tell you that the new features of the Open Web are still years behind Flash Player and other plugins. However, I believe that the amazing passion currently growing within that community can lead to exciting opportunities and new innovation. Advocates of the Open Web are currently trying to show that Flash isn’t required in the browser, and I encourage them to compete strongly in the coming months to prove their assertions.

To succeed, to knock Flash off it’s throne as the strongest innovator in web technology, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript need to be pushing out new versions much faster. When did HTML4 come out? Not in this decade. Consider the way everyone has been talking about HTML5 and CSS3 so much lately. I’ve seen so many cool examples that show the improvements over HTML4 and CSS2. To me, it seems like most of the big decisions have already been made. Yes, it may be a while before the standard is officially approved, but the important stuff is there and browsers are implementing things like mad. That’s so awesome!

With that in mind, I strongly suggest that we all should begin thinking about the next versions of Open Web tech very, very soon. You know why? Because Adobe generally has an 18 month release cycle for many of its products. Flash Player will continue to improve with cool new features, and that’s what keeps developers like me sticking with Adobe’s infamous plugin. I’m not saying that HTML needs the same duration for a release cycle. Standards are finalized at a slower pace for good reason. However, I strongly believe that HTML and all of its open friends have been stagnating for far too long, and that the release cycles have been slower than they should be.

Every browser vendor has been committing to new features like crazy lately, and many have been inventing new APIs that greatly improve the web. Keep that up, guys, because I’m impressed. However, I think one extra bit of effort should be combined with all this new stuff. Start throwing things into a bin that will eventually become HTML6, CSS4, and ECMAScript 6. Maybe not immediately, but I think 12 to 24 months from now, the most interesting features of the upcoming Open Web should be considered ready for the majority of smaller websites, and six months away from appearing on major web portals. At that time, developers should be just as excited about HTML6 and other future tech as they are today about HTML5.

I’m a Flash developer, and I’ve been one for nearly six years. I love Flash, and I hope that it continues to improve for a long time to come. However, I understand the role of the open web, and I want to see it follow a similar path. I do not see any sort of epic opposition between Flash and standards. In fact, I think that plugins like Flash Player and Silverlight can help to drive standards by being a test bed. Still, I see excellent opportunities for more friendly competition between plugins and web browsers, much like browsers compete among themselves to provide the best user experience for visiting our favorite websites. However, even with all the passion that has recently grown within the Open Web community, I think that there’s a chance that everyone could all settle down again and leave those technologies in limbo for a while. That would be unfortunate, and I encourage anyone who supports the idea of an Open Web to advocate for quicker standardization and to push for continued innovation in the very near future.